Moonshell Island - Ocean Progression

Hello friends, Sam here!

It's been a long time in the making, but I'm finally reaching a point where I am content with the ocean tileset for Moonshell Island, though I do intend to polish it more eventually. Now that I've reached this milestone, I want to share the steps it took to reach this result, as it wasn't easy and it wasn't something I've seen commonly done. Also, there's a fun bonus at the end of this post for patrons only!

As you can see above, the ocean saw many stages, most of which I shared at the time in the VIP room on our Discord server, some never made it anywhere else.

My first attempts were more traditional - no offset in the animation, fewer complications, auto-tileable. This was alright, but it didn't achieve the calming effect I wanted. 

Around this time I had seen this impressive piece by @AlcopopStar on Twitter, and I realized that if I slanted each frame and was mindful of how they connect with each other, I could offset the frames of each tile to capture a more gradual effect.  Of course, this was way easier said than done.

In fact, it was such a battle for me to wrap my head around and to just get the basic guidelines done that I took several months hiatus from this particular asset. Over the last month or so I have picked it back up to round the corners and experiment until I was happy. 

At this point you may be wondering about auto-tiling, and I'm sorry to say that I haven't figured out a way to do that efficiently. As well, I only have tiles for one direction, which I rotate and flip as I build the map. With 16 frames each, it gets hard to keep track of which tiles go together otherwise. This becomes problematic when you try to add texture, because the seams are quite obvious, as shown below:

Surprisingly, what wound up making the biggest difference was adding some sloppy curves by moving the middle section of the tile down with all frames selected (thank you Aseprite!) and finally caving in and adjusting a few colours from my SPF-80 Palette and doing a minor graphical overhaul for a more dreamy vibe. Sometimes you gotta break your palette to achieve what you want. Believe me, I fought far too long against it. Looks like a new Moonshell Island palette will be a future digital download release! ;)

To summarize, this was one of if not THE most challenging things I've worked on, but when I look at how it has turned out, I don't regret it at all, and I am proud of myself for persevering and getting back to it after I had cleared my mind. Fulfilling your dreams isn't easy or quick, but you absolutely should go for it. It all adds up eventually!

If you'd like to try this method for your own ocean tileset, I'm releasing the early (straight-edged) tileset to all patrons in this post to use as a guideline.

I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes content! Thanks for sticking with us through the journey.

Your friend,

Sam