It's pretty good nightblade, but yes it does need some contrast. The main issue with the map is that the road feels really out of place to me. It doesn't help that the map is just 3 different shades of yellow/brown. A good way to fix this is to make the houses a completely different color (like a gray). The best example of this that I can tell you about is the town of Dao in Illusion of Gaia.

Ugh this is the only screenshot I could find unfortunately. And the message box in this game sucks and covers 1/2 the screen. There are youtube videos of the place too if you need a better idea. Xenogears did a similar color scheme with Aveh as well. Hopefully you see what I'm getting at, though. I'm not going to tell you to remake the whole thing, because it's still good and doesn't warrant a full remake.


Hmm, good idea neophyte, I'll edit the colors of the houses (easily via photoshop) to see if I can get a better balance.

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ps the map isn't necessarily empty, folks. I would keep the houses closer together, but ADDING detail to this isn't necessary. A bit of greenery could help, but nothing too drastic.

That's exactly what I did, actually.

Desert Town Image Blah.

Nightblade - There's nothing wrong with the spaciness of the map.  It's not like it's a giant ass dungeon or anything, there should be more room in a town.  Everyone's always so set on cluttering everything up.

The houses are too large, King Tetiro (the roofs specifically). They completely cover the road and it's impossible to see where to go or if there are any doors you can walk into. It isn't necessary to make things that large, the roofs cover more than half the screenshot and offer nothing in terms of direction or anything that is remotely interesting.

Your graphics are pretty though, I checked out your topic. Hopefully you can fix things up a bit, at least make the road visible.

What is up with those chars man?

They're in proportion, okay. That doesn't mean you need to sacrifice visibility and navigation over it, though. I like to know where I'm going, even if there is nothing interesting on the path. All you have to do is move the bottom houses down a little bit so the whole path is visible. It's almost like a rule of thumb, you don't want to obscure the players path for no reason! There are lots of games that have cities just like yours, so it's not like you can't have a balance.