Originally Posted by Treylina

I rarely remember my password (I was on vacation), so here's a somewhat late reply.



1. Then don't use MSpain. Seriously, Graphicsgale barely takes any time to download, it's a pretty small program. It also lets you make tile-sized grids so there's no need to draw them. I save as a palletised 256 colour image then there's no need to worry about the pallette much, since I can just load pallettes and see them all the time and changing a colour in the pallette causes everything else to change in the image that uses the same colour too.

2. An environment is not determined by the perspective you use, but the theme. Your tileset did not have a theme (or at least from what I could see so far). Likewise, a 2D tileset can feel like an environment, even blocky ones (you can get away with blocky tiles in man-made environments).

Another thing that bugs me about your tileset is that it is literally pillow-shading. There is no certain light-source, it appears to be coming from all directions which is plain nonsense and loses any sort of focus. Also, there's 2 duplicate tiles (lower left and above it).

That asides, I think themeless tilesets can look good, but a real environment will always be better. There's loads of "Random colours" tilesets out there, and a 3D perspective will not make them any more of an environment.