Phew. This is it. Added MOAR mountains and trees (ru stream). Also added new tiles with special lightning – to create dark and atmospheric narrow passages. I really hope it’s last tiles additions for now – I wanna proceed to MAP at last! 😀
I’ve understood new important thing – that location design is like creating a movie – you should not only try to make it realistic.. Actually sometimes it’s vice versa in our case because we got pixel-art style. The most important thing to make it look ‘nice’ and balanced. It’s art of design.. Previously I’ve had some experience in graphic design – it’s mainly control of elements and forms and their relations.
Before problem with mountains (when I put there too many different pieces together), I didn’t had feeling that location design got something common with traditional graphic design.. But actually there are a lot of common – elements and forms, colors and contrasts. You have to look at your location as at ‘picture’, not just trying to make it look diverse and like in ‘real-life’ (taking into account geomorphology principles etc).
Resume: properly designed map with 30 different tiles could look much better, than very diverse and erratic map made of 300 different tiles.