greybox tileset for da game. using the tricks i talked about before with the slight color differences to help distinguish Z-levels. i think this is good but i need to figure out a way to actually build the maps with the height levels in a way that doesn't suck...

like i could just make a tileset with like [ 0 ][ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ] etc. for different heights, then auto-tile it based on that info. that'll work good but it'll be hard to do stuff like add details and props and stuff like that on top of that map since it doesn't visually line-up

i also want to do things like be able to raise/lower entire chunks of ground for puzzles and dungeons, so it can't always just be pre-rendered, it needs to be a bit more flexible than that. maybe i just place props/etc. ON the z-tiles and just have them y-offset by sampling the terrain below them

that actually might be the way to go

i think i actually do it this way: terrain is in vertical "strips" that occupy one tile on the x/y plane, each with a represented height. then i can use the surrounding tile z-values to choose which one to render

i think these will also render their front-faces and surface separately, with front-faces getting their depth from the tile's bottom-center base position, and the surface getting it from the center top position

this will result in a lot of over-rendering for any areas where geometry obscures other geometry... but having obscured terrain in this perspective isn't really good level design, and pixel art is insanely fast to render anyway, so i don't think this is a problem

what's a good name for these things? - pillars? - piles? - stacks?

there'll probably be a few extra surface/edge types for the final rendering like how i did the black against darker background surfaces/etc. but for the greyboxing i think i'll just keep it simple

lol im gonna cheat and not do L-corners (for the greybox at least)

adding shadows does a LOT. i think tilesets will also have a "shadows" section that will be rendered transparently over top and also auto-calculated