Joel Ryan: A Small Clump of Pixels: Creating the Sil Q Tileset
34When the developer, half, forked Angband to make Sil, he made major changes to the codebase to create something elegant, thematic, and fundamentally new. Although Angband has tiles, Sil was developed without much regard for the tile display system.
I worked with Quirk to create and implement a new, custom tileset for his variant, Sil-Quirk (Sil-Q). I would like to discuss the process of creating the tileset for Sil-Q, as well as my thoughts on tilesets in general: the balance of representative vs symbolic tiles, the role of visual clarity in roguelikes, the challenges of drawing with individual pixels, the visual tools that a tileset artist has to communicate information, and the lessons I learned along the way. Finally, I would like to emphasize that my experience in creating a tileset was both enjoyable and fulfilling, and I encourage anyone interested in tilesets to try their hand at making their own.
Lead-in music generated by Sonat Uzun.