first serious steps into game creation using the peyton burnham method

  Next project file. I'm following Peyton Burnham's basic RPG tutorial. I got majorly sidetracked looking for tiles and other assets because I am lazy. More importantly, I don't like having to stop and do something else and then go back, but it seems that I wound up doing it anyway. I took a long cut. 

  After a day(night) of lollygagging I've got the footage above. 

Don't be like me. Don't waste time hunting down tilesets. You might not even like tilesets. I might not even like tile sets. I debated back and forth after wasting time researching tile sizes, and scrubbing through old half broken blogs, if I even liked how tile based environments worked.

  In some cases, tile based can speed up the level building process, but the rigidity can severely slow you don't if you don't know what you want or need. I had the issue where I wasn't completely sure what I wanted to make, so I didn't know what type of tiles I needed. Everything down to the plot, location, tile resolution affects what kind of tiles you wind up using. Art styles clash if you can't find everything you need from one person. Making the 1st room was a headache, but today when I made the 2nd room (a hallway) it was much easier.

It's hard when you're making all of the original decisions, but once it's decided and you're just slapping down walls and floors, it gets much simpler. 

Although, I did the furniture wrong. So I'll have to go back in and change the tileset and then make another one for the furniture exclusively. Very annoying. The process of setting up the tileset in my art program is what was so slow and annoying in the first place.

  Currently as of writing, I have the game set up in multiple layers of tiles. It's kind of annoying though, and since I did the furniture off a whim and didn't go back to the video, I put the furniture on the tileset instead of letting them be their own sprites and objects. This slows the room building down. I also have another layer over the player and other objects, that allows for depth through layering, but again, it is slow and annoying. 

If anyone knows other ways of doing this separate from Peyton's method of making the furniture objects and not background tile pieces, let me know in the comments.

The day I wasn't really working I was also brainstorming whether or not I want to use prerendered flat backgrounds like in the game Moon to 

1. maybe make the game run smoother in the end, because as an old pc haver, I hate unoptimized games.
2. have softer more natural visuals, because tiles are Very Square.

Alternative methods of making a 2d game didn't originally occur to me, because I was so used to the tileset RPG method of map creation. Game maker isn't made specifically for RPGs the way RPGmaker is, so I can technically do whatever I want and just give off the illusion of a standard puzzle RPG.

This process will probably take a lot of experimentation, since forums tend to not be very helpful in their attitudes. Whatever I discover will end up on this blog.