Here comes the Dorcas Chin
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I had the cursed concept while working on Dorcas - something I forgot to include in the post three days ago - of making Dorcas older. Then that gradually turned into an attempt to further make him old, to differentiate him further from his source, and now we’re here. Old man’s just tryna make a living by beating the crap out of whatever is in front of him and if he hears an arrow fly over his head he might just get PTSD.
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Nice chin.
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Here comes the Maroon Chin!
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Had life kinda catch up to me (barely scraped by a History exam, spent a good portion of the past week working on a creative writing story to get my midterm portfolio to 22 pages, with the required floor for said portfolio being only 10), so I’m sorry for being a bit inactive.
I’ve also been doing a lot of shadowing around, helping people through DMs on simple tasks like adding better aesthetics to dirt on a Lava Cave, telling someone that their palettes were garbage over the span of a week or helping someone make their map as good as I can. Plus the requests I keep forgetting about but lets not talk about that rn
This is also a great opportunity to remind people that it’s perfectly aight to grab all my maps and use them, or to ask me for a map/tileset that isn’t released because i monky brain. Had a guy ask for a bunch of advice including getting a map, and was more than happy to do so.
ONTO ACTUAL THINGS IVE BEEN DOING
hey look at that it’s a cutie
No idea what I’ll name her. She’s in the same boat as Beruka or my Garcia splice, ask before using and you’ll almost surely get denied. I love this one, and I’ll continue to work on her in the next while.
She was my first personal experiment with the Character Creator program to generate a portrait; all of my Wasspix portraits were based on ones he made using it. Wanted to see if that was fun, and while the original created thing is awful I love thow this turned out!
Also, Levin said he might be doing something with the portrait, so I’m looking forward to that.
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nice stuff as always
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bless you vesly
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Thanks Levin for the help! They were willing to ask to clean up the portrait without me even asking. Bless people that do that.
Here she is. Cleaned up and all. Considering that it started as a portrait generator and turned into something actually presentable, I’ll take it.
Not going to post the mouth/eye frames as this is going to remain a splice only I’m gonna use. However, if you wanna reference it, lmao I can’t stop you from doing that, do it to your heart’s content.
oh I’m also working on a Zora splice. Maybe I’ll give a hint as to where my username’s from when I do so no points for guessing.
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I think i solved it
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Zora’s Height Error Fixing/Castle and Fort tileset Building Hight Guide thing idk
Hi. I hate height errors. And I got so tired of explaining to multiple people, like with the cave except most people never spoke of the cave for good reason, so now I’m making a guide (and have a fun game: guess the name of each of these .pngs as I go.)
Please be warned, though, that my sarcastic humor is shining through today.
If this image doesn’t trigger fight or flight reactions, you are not yet a true mapper. This map gives me PTSD on a level comparable to that of a Vietnam war veteran when they hear a booming noise from around a tree. EVERYTHING IS WRONG HERE.
But I want to dissect why everything is wrong.
We’ve got two major points of contention here - Overuse of stairs and consistently not good wall heights, both of which contribute to the other, how we can address them, and ways of fixing this specific map so that we can still have height without being confusing.
Stairs are fantastic when they work, with the caveat there being when they work. Overusing them leads to difficulty in truly representing the height of a building with the outside/interior walls.
I follow a basic formula, entirely centralized around a formula.
Outside Wall Height = Total number of stairs used to reach the top floor +1.
Interior wall height = How many stairs up you go to reach the top floor +1.
However, words are garbage for understanding, and as such, I have some examples.
Here’s a map recently posted in Cartography from someone else. (with the finalized version not free to use, so don’t go asking me.) We can count the number of stairs reaching the top floor and immediately notice that the outside wall isn’t as tall as it should be. When going up three fights of stairs, the exterior walls are… 2 tall?
Here, I’ve taken creative liberties (also not a vers that’ll be released) to demonstrate how the wall should look. Following our rule, since the tallest floor requires you to travel up two flights of stairs, the exterior walls are all 3 tall (2 stars + 1).
However, we can also follow the second rule for all of the interior walls. On the blue cobbled floor, since that level is on ground level, it requires two stairs to get to the top floor, and as such its walls are also 3 tall. On the yellow floors, there is only one flight of stairs to get to the top, and as such the walls are uniformly 2 tall (1 stair +1). For the throne room itself, since it is the top floor, there is no need for more stairs to go up, so the walls are 1 tall (0 stairs + 1).
In this image, I’ve used Paint to add color coding. Every area surrounded in red - The blue cobble and the outside grass - is all on Ground level, and its walls should be 3 high. Everywhere in Cyan is on the first floor of the building, and should have its walls be 2 tall. The areas in pink are the top floor, and as such only need 1 tile of wall.
This REVOLUTIONARY tactic is what I use when helping other people with wall height, since it immediately puts it into perspective if there’s glaring height errors. Try doing that
You wanna know how I do my wall height when making my own maps? FIND OUT HOW!Scientists hate him! Click here to find out how!
nah really i just eyeball it.
Here’s some more examples.
Despite being a Flasuban tileset, all exterior walls are 4 high, and most interior ones are 2 high. There are two flights of stairs to get to the main floor, and an extra stair for the throne room, so there are 3 flights +1, aka 4 high walls.
Here, we only have two stairs of height, and as such exterior walls are 3 high and the main floor is only 1 high.
Here, every floor aside the central, dusty floors is the ‘bottom floor’, and as such requires one tile to reach the highest point, so they have 2 high walls. The central rooms, being at the top of the building, all only have 1. Note the consistency in all of the non-central rooms.
Now, we can come back to the piece of crap from earlier.
Since we have WAY too many stairs and tons of height errors for walls, we can tackle them one at a time, and I am a firm believer that it’s easier to do stairs first.
Mind you, we need to also note that our stairs will look weird at first.
We’ve got two routes, one of which I’ll go into more detail about.
Basic baby level, only one stair. All interior walls will remain 1 tall, exterior wall is two. This is the simplest route for buildings that don’t need to be tall to display scale, think maps like Neimi’s chapter in FE8 or the Dorcas chapter in FE7.
Here, we’ve got a ton of stairs, with clearly defined top floor, middle floor, and no ‘ground floor’. I’ll explain more with a color coded image.
Same color coding as before because I’m lazy. Red, being the bottommost ‘floor’, in this case exclusively the outside, requires two high walls to get to the top floor, and as such needs three high walls. Cyan, being on the first floor, needs one flight, so 2 high walls. Pink, being the top floor, requires only 1 high walls.
Here’s it with proper wall height and now my sanity for this is waning.
What if we have a side room? Well, all the same rules apply.
Here, we’ve added two rooms. The top right room, being on the top floor, remains with 1 tall walls as with the rest of the floor. On the far left, our new room is on the first floor, so its walls, like the rest of rooms on the first floor, have 2 tall walls.
ok cuz my night is just starting but im already super tired…
Remember one simple thing: C O N S I S T E N C Y. Make sure that the wall height on the exterior is always the same height of everywhere else on the same building, and you’ll be fine.
If you have any other questions on more detailed maps, the Cartography room on FEU’s Discord server is the best place for me to respond. Or, if you need help but don’t feel like asking there, Zoramine Fae#2325 is my Discord tag (you’ll have to be on the discord to message me, though) or you can DM me on the forums. I respond as soon as I can, although I tend to need .tmx files to fix issues I find.
aight im done
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chair, clearly you never fought in the great mapping wars of 2018… we lost many good hackers in that strife. may they work on real games in peace 
(also good tutorial zoramine, you have gained subscriber)
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You’d understand if you sat in #Cartography for long enough. I’m convinced that the giant staircase is out to get me, and my sleep paralysis demon is slanted stairs. you don’t undeRSTAND MY PAIN
also i might be working on a pathing guide thing for sand/dirt on most tilesets, from fields to castle, so on. I might have extra notes on specific tilesets for that one.
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You just need to backwards long jump past the neverending stairs.
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This sprite is not F2U F2E, and will never be F2U F2E. Do not ask to use this portrait. I will immediately get annoyed if you do so.
Thanks to Wan for giving tips for a good portion of it and Busk for pretty much redoing the entire shading on the jacket.
Here she is, pretty much the posterchild for my writing/spriting time here. She was one of the first portraits I’d ever done, and the first nearly fully custom one I’d done - I’d only done Gala, the Garcia splice with Douglas’s armor, and a super basic Villager recolor before this.
Her hair now matches what it should have been (Brown and dark grey were a better match visually at the time, with my terrible ability to make portraits), her jacket looks more like a jacket with how it curves, better shading everywhere, and she isn’t a midget.
For those curious on who she is and why I cared enough to return to a sprite that is way too old, and why I almost entirely remade it, this character is Zoramine Fae. She originally was a character from a story back in middle school for a class assignment that I quickly grew attached to, have done pencilwork three times to detail her out (all of which I love) and have been slowly working on adding details to her personality.
Recently, with a creative writing course, I’d written up a short chapter with our only requirement being ‘Realism and showing rather than telling,’ aka lots of descriptions of what characters do/where they’re at. I took some time to write out the minimum 4 pages… then went straight into 12 pages of plot. Because I felt like it.
She’s the only character I’ve made that I sincerely would never drop, and while my username everywhere on the internet was different for a while, this is now what I go by everywhere. Twitter, Steam, etcetcetc.
This is my pride and joy, to see her like this in good quality. I’ll also be working on a non-hoodie version, just like she normally has up top.
Also, my older versions will get thanos’d, as they’re too low quality to hold onto. They barely represent the character anymore, and honestly succ.
And here’s a comparison shot of the old vs new.
uh
how do i end serious posts
Why did the chicken cross the road?
He couldn’t, because there was a height error placing a wall in the way.
hAHAAAAAA
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Hey look, she’s got her long hair out. Originally, I was going to give her a ponytail, which is what I’ve drawn her with over the past… iunno, five years, but doing that in pixels was such a logistical nightmare for me (as I can’t cobble something together and say I’m happy with it considering it’s Zoramine) that I just gave up and let the hair flow. I think I like it more this way, though.
This one is, like the previous one, completely off limits. I did nearly all of the editing this time, but thankies to Wan and Wass for pointing out that she initially had that Judgral hair sticking out.
And for two final side-by-sides…
Here’s a shot of both current versions side-by-side, and…
here’s a comparison shot of all four versions - hoodieless and hoodie’d, new and old.
She’ll be going up top, and the old ones will be replaced.
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Real mappers build their walls and elevations in Minecraft first, then map it out in Tiled. 
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damn, guess i gotta go buy minecraft
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fr doe it is pretty helpful if you struggle to visualise things in a 3D space.
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or get one of the free clones.