I've been drawing it all manually, pixel by pixel, in Paint.net.
GraphicsGale for the animations, which I haven't shown any yet. I really liked how easy Pencil was to get animation onto the screen, but it wasn't easy to work on such a small scale. GraphicsGale is more complicated, but I figured out how to get the same onion skin, so it should work great.
I was playing around a bit with different ideas for dirt / grass blocks. I think I like it better when I don't try to hide the seams and let the player see that they are tiles.
The problem is that I'm not a good enough artist to pull off any sort of texture while losing the seams. Even with multiple versions, and a random element to which gets drawn, I still end up with a visual repeating pattern. It looks odd when you can tell by looking at it that the person was trying to hide it.
I'm still going to do some randomness to the blocks, and I will keep the dynamic texture system I had, where as you dig the shape of the blocks change a bit.
Once I redo the character it won't clash so much (1x1 pixels vs 2x2 pixels). Haven't gotten to that yet.
What would it look like with a border that was closer to the colour of the dirt (a.k.a brown) instead of the black seams? That could give it a block look without the grid being so dominant.
That's what I had before, although I don't know if I ever took a picture / video of it. It looked alright, but clashed with my style of black borders on everything.
The more I look at those tiles the more they grow on me. I've got a project for class I have to finish up this weekend, but after that I can get going banging out some progress. I'll test some ideas out for tiles then.
If you've seen any of my youtube videos, you can see how many different tile ideas I've gone through. This one in particular had the brown borders. But it was a flat brown tile.
Yay! I've got a drawing tablet incoming. Now I can get some concept art down; drawing with my mouse was killing my wrist. This should really help me get my thoughts out there. Then I can just convert them to pixel art.
Had my last class of the semester. Finals next week, but that means I can finally get these images broken up and start programming them into the game tomorrow.