The artist's tiles came in! His work is really awesome looking... unfortunately you can't see that here, because he created it at a huge resolution and it doesn't translate well down to small size. I've just spent the entire day today working with those tiles myself (and creating a bunch of my own!) to get them to work in the context of the game. It's a massive amount of work. So far, this here is the best I've come up with. I kinda like it, but it is quite busy. The ninja himself will be undergoing an overhaul in the future which will make him much easier to spot on a background like this. I'm having a really hard time figuring out how and where to tone down the detail and noise to keep all the pretty stuff I like, yet still make it playable instead of a screen full of wild colors. The worst part is how the roofs look so much like you should be running on them, but they're just background. Due to the nature of the game, they'd have to jut out as blocks to be solid, but doing that would make them hideous.
This is actually only half of the tileset, and not my favorite half. The other half is a nifty bamboo fortress kind of thing (just like this stone building, but made of bamboo). I'm looking forward to spending another day trying to hammer that into some semblance of usefulness too...
PS - this is a temporary background that I scribbled in paintshop. That part at least will
definitely look much better!
PPS - The thing about the Incomprehensible Line means that I've added some stuff to one of the scripts, but I have yet to actually implement the game's ability to read that new stuff.
