Crates

One of the big challenges of tile-based, hand-drawn games is creating interesting, seemingly untiled patterns out of small sets of varied drawings. Seeing the same crate, set down by the work crew at the same exact angle every time, quickly gets fatiguing for the player. On the other hand, drawing dozens of different angles for every map object becomes fatiguing for the artist even faster.

The fair approach is to draw just a few variations (in this case, only two crates) and mix them up in interesting ways. Hopefully it'll look organic enough.

P.S. Yup, we have crates. Every video game must have crates.