This is another theme that has been in progress for a long time, but unlike the afghan and gems themes, this one has not been released yet, in any form. This will just be a development thread until the theme is complete, but in the meantime I have some pictures to show my work so far.

Here is the overall board, as it exists right now:



As you can see, the board frame looks very rough right now. Hopefully that can be fixed soon, but there is what it will basically look like. Also, right now the grass looks more like astroturf, because it's the same tile repeated over and over. If transparent tiles can make a comeback, then this board will look SO much better. Same for the board coordinate boxes...when they can be toggled on and off, the board will look much better.

But in the meantime, I am still working on getting this theme looking as good as I possibly can. I just added grass to the edge of the letter tiles, so they now look like they are actually resting in the grass. :) The effect is subtle, but that was what I was going for. I'm pretty pleased with it!



Again, that board will look a lot better with a solid background in the "normal" spaces.

What do you think?

Does it look okay so far, in spite of what's wrong with it?

Does the orange tileset look ok, or would you suggest another color?

Thanks for any input!

Brilliant! The grass applications are really nice. I wouldn't want to have normal pieces in red, but if you achieved this by using the program's color feature it's easy to adjust myself. What makes me wonder is the green shadow at top and right hand of the central area in the first picture. It would be nice if you could attach the theme onto this thread.

Yay, thank you!

I did not use the letter plane (the "placed letter" value) to color the tile, that is the color of the bitmap image. I usually do not like using the "placed letter" value because when the board is tilted, you can see the original color underneath. This is the same bitmap for the tiles that the other two designs use, I just re-mapped the palates to recolor them.

I would be willing to make several different tilesets for each design, if there was a way to switch them. Alternately, is there any way to put the "placed letter" color on all 5 exposed sides, or at least the 4 front ones? That way I could just make all the tiles white, and users could switch them to any color they wanted. Maybe it could be as simple as choosing a "placed letter" color currently is?

...Or we could just keep it the way it is. :p It probably doesn't bother anybody but me. LOL!

However, I would like to be able to provide some flexibility for people, without having to feel limited myself. I don't want to have to make all of the tilesets beige or white, for instance. I can even make alternate dsgn files... to have "Garden-ORANGE" or "Garden-WHITE", etc. I think that would be too much clutter though.

I just think it would be a shame for people to miss out on enjoying a design that they really like, simply because they find the tileset illegible. Some people are colorblind, and in varying ways! And then there are simple matters of personal taste.

Oh! And I had planned to attach the design file after I'd made it look a little better, but if you would like I will do it sooner than that. Just please don't release it officially yet!

[EDIT] I think I may have misunderstood what you meant about "normal pieces", Scotty!

Here's how this theme looks right now, thanks to new changes made by Scotty recently. Hi-res board textures are now possible! Not only that, but the option to toggle the board coordinate boxes on and off has been added, so the skinned boards now look much better. Now I need to figure out how to make all of my designs work with 3D gameplay, also! I think it's just a matter of integrating the coordinate box render settings, but I'm not sure. In any case, here is how the "garden" theme looks:



Like the marble & gems board, this one will look MUCH better when I can get transparent textures working properly. The natural grass looks much, much better than that repeating pattern!