Water, High and Low

Now, since I'm refocusing from interior design to exterior, it's high time to take care of one of the mechanics for the outdoor map!

As I might have mentioned before, you'll be able to raise and lower the water levels, and in doing so things will, of course, change on the map.

So, the first thing I'm gonna fix is the ground. Remember in Temple of Seasons, how you could kind of spot the underlying texture beneath the water?

We kind of want the same effect here, so I'm gonna create something similar.

Step 1, changing the water color to a shade that looks more like you can kind of spot the ground underneath the water. I first tried directly copying the shade from the Temple of Seasons:

However, I didn't really like how that shade looked next to everything else in Tai Ming, so I decided to go for a lighter, cooler hue:

I then started adding some texture to the ground:

To make it seem like the water is going above the cliffs, we added a faded layer of the water color on top of the lowest 2-3 pixels of each platform:

..and then smoothed out the edge between the ground and the water a bit:

Finally, I felt the ground looked a bit lame with just the one texture, so I started adding rocks and moved the texture bits around to make it less random-looking:

All done! And here's the opposite version, with high water levels (which will look much better once the water animations are in ;3):