Graphics conundrum

Since I'm off the development until Teemu is ready I have been thinking about tile graphics. The problem is that tiles are small and it's difficult to make them look clean. Besides the last scaling from 24x24 to 32x32 made tiles look smudgy which has to be fixed.

I have two options and both of them are bad. I can clean up the tiles manually or recreate them in 3D. So I've given more thought to 3D option the more I think about it. The good thing about 3D is that you can scale the tile to pretty much any usable size and always get a sharp result. The downside is that it probably requires more work and creating 3D models for small tile size is not that simple. You can't just create a detailed or even "realistic" model and assume it looks good in 32x32 pixel size, because the details are lost. The model has to emphasize the shapes you want to see in the object clearly. Also, any kind of detailed textures are waste of time, it has to be a coarse approximation of a material.

I can try and see how long it takes to create a small subset of objects. Either way tiles are going to be a huge amount of work and I'm not happy about the current quality or even style of graphics in Kaduria. However I could even release the game with the current tiles and then slowly remake them.