Looks awesome!

Might I suggest some sort of shadow-effect under the rocks etc to help 'tie' the objects to the ground better? I was a massive offender of this for a number of years ;D

here is a quick mockup:

Wow, looks really amazing! Nice work.

Agreed, looks very nice!

Thanks for the comments!

I've tried to implement these shadows beneath objects with ambient occlusion but sadly I could not get it to work quite right. I might give it another try in the future.

@O-san

Being 2D assets you could potentially 'bake' a hand-drawn fringe into the image (this is what I do with Revel Immortal);

Another option is to 'eat' away a bit of the image edge in the alpha channel with a soft natural brush, exposing a bit of the ground through the image; giving the indication that dirt and cruft is being painted over the front of the graphic.

I took the liberty of making another example image, a copy with and without fringe; and exposure of the fringe detail on white.

no problem That was my first idea, using blending. However I rely on the hardware to do the sorting of my game objects and the z-buffer does not play nice with blended textures. The engine do support blended objects but using it for an entire level would break the overall consistency with the rest of the world. I also imagine it would eventually leading to objects being sorted in the wrong way (painters algorithm problem).

@O-san Ahh! indeed I am very familiar with the painters algorithim problem.

As I'm sure you remember I did a fairly large Isometric game, and Isometric can be a pain in the ass because of this

Normally it is broken by using split-up graphics in the case of 'L-shaped' or otherwise weird sizes; in your case you're using the zbuffer with some information of 'real geometry' to produce localized splitting automatically.

Thats a neat approach, but indeed it fails for partially blended objects, and now it all comes full circle; you really have no good ability up front for doing edge-blended graphics (across the whole level) which normally gets rid of the hard edge effects.

--it would probably also kill batch performance that I'm sure you're taking advantage of.

At the resolution you're using, a fringe could probably be baked in using full opaque and full transparent pixels, but it likely wouldn't look /that/ great.

Assuming you render your ground and surface objects seperately, it is possible a solution could be to render a fringe or shadow at that point, without worying about overdraw and using full capacity of blending.

These days I'm back at using a traditional 2D API via HTML5 Canvas, which is nice; if you can stand the loss in oomph that we all have grown accustomed to with accellerated implementations on 3D hardware.

That being said; you've been at this kind of thing as long as I have hehe

Wow this is awesome! Keep up the great work.

Thank you for posting this - it's great to see how you can make a very effective in-game asset in a few simple steps!

I mostly work with concept level art, rather than polished pieces, but I've been learning lately about producing in-game art and this has solidified a lot of the thoughts I'd had on it... so thanks again!

Looks good and as ever very interesting to see the step-by-step.

Thanks for the comments, you are very kind =)

@EDI: Tried blended walls inside the cave instead of alpha tested.. looks pretty good so I think I'll keep it =)