So, here's a mini blog about how I did the tiles for our game "Warden of the Woods".

Our game basically is a 2d top-down pixel art game about a little fairy warden who has to protect and take care of the nearby woods.

I was in charge of most of the environment art.

My goal for this environment art was simple : I wanted to make something that's simple to make, reusable but still organic.

I had heard of splat textures before in Pixel Art, but I never got to use them.

Splat tiles are basically sprites that are larger than normal grid tiles, but have varying shapes near the edges, creating a more organic look!

I decided to use splat tiles on the Unity Tilemap, with a custom shader that gives the tiles a little bit of offset based on a 'Gradient Noise" node within Shader Graph. Normally this would deform the pixels, but we made sure to use the Upscale Render Texture feature on the Pixel Perfect Camera inside the Universal Rendering Pipeline.

Using this shader and these sprites in a custom rule tile for the Unity Tilemap allowed us to create varied grass and paths with only a few simple textures.

I'd love to share more thoughts about Pixel-Tech Art topics like this in the future on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@RunicPixels/, so stay tuned.

Play our game here : https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/warden-of-the-woods