Isle of Lore 2: Hex Tiles - The Big 2.0 Update

This update took quite some time to realize, but I'm happy to have finally reached the goal line: Isle of Lore 2: Hex Tiles goes into the second round with a bunch of major changes, addressing common complaints and laying the groundwork for future updates of my compatible packs, like Strategy Figures, on which I will start working soon.

The update is of course free of charge and you should be able to download it here on itch.io right away, but if you haven't bought the hex tiles yet, there is a sale going on right now! If you bought the pack on another platform, please reach out to me, as updating the pack on other platforms might take a while!

Anyway, let's take a look at what changed:

• Darker, more saturated color palette. The water is now a proper blue instead of dark grey.
• Support for Color Mapper and Tile Builder so you can re-export the elements and tiles with your own color palette. As a result, there are no Krita-files for the tiles anymore: instead, the tiles are available in a data-format from which they can be re-exported to png with Tile Builder.
• New tiles: Desert, Jungle, Wheat, Mixed Forest, Meadows, Clouds, Ocean with Rocks.
• Mountain tiles for all the biomes instead of just a handful of them.
• Lake versions for tiles where a lake version makes sense, like a pine forest with a lake (but not a swamp with a lake).
• Winter variants for all the tiles where a winter version makes sense.
• Changed the look of some of the tiles, especially omitting yellow and red bushes and grasses for now, although I included these elements in the files, so you could still re-create tiles with those types of bushes.
• The elements (like trees, bushes etc.) are now included, as separate image files. Before, people had to gather them from the tile source files or ask me for a separate download of the elements.
• New elements: Big Waves, Clouds, Desert Hills, Jungle Trees, Palm Trees, Sand Marks, Sand Patches, Wheat. Also: winter versions accordingly.
• Added flat-bottom tiles to all tiles (the old pack only had pointy-bottom ones).
• Complete re-drawing of all the images, in a higher resolution (tiles are now 840x840 pixels instead of 210x210 pixels; a pine tree is 336x416 instead of 84x104). Especially for print projects, this should make a huge difference.
• In regard to flairs and markers, some of them got a new look.
• Added grounds and three different tile borders as separate images.
• Excluded sprite sheets, as I thought it would duplicate too much content and increase the file size further. If you need them, please let me know.
• Removed tutorials for HexKit and Tiled, because they were always out-of-date after a couple months. If you need help, join us on my Discord Server!
• Changed the name from "Isle of Lore 2: Hex Tiles Regular" to "Isle of Lore 2: Hex Tiles".
• Renamed "Deciduous Trees" to "Oak Trees", "Conifer Trees" to "Pine Trees" and "Moor" to "Swamp".
• Proper Documentation-file in the download, which can be viewed here, too.
• Updated the product page to showcase the new content accordingly.

I'm especially proud of sharing the tools with you which allow you to adapt the elements and tiles and make them fit your needs. As an example, with Color Mapper, you could re-map the colors so pine trees have nice autumn colors instead of a green look. The single layers making up a pine tree will be changed accordingly, and across all pine trees, in one go. With Tile Builder you can then use scripts to create a new version of the pine forest tiles, but where the green pine trees are switched out with your autumn pine trees and exported to a png image file.

Those tile-data-files, which are used by Tile Builder to export the tiles to png, were made in a software I'm currently developing: Hex Map Maker, an editor for both hex maps and hex tiles. The hex tile part already works fine and allowed me to click together tiles with proper sorting for the elements and save them to the aforementioned data format. It will take some more time to get the tool ready for you and I can't wait to get it into your hands! :)

Best regards,
Steven