I think they're both too saturated to be background rocks.

They're saturated enough that they might draw attention to themselves, away from the active playing area. The bottom ones have more reasonable saturation, but poorer values (your middle two colours are almost identical).

Mostly though, they're too saturated to read as rocks or common soil, period.
Please don't take offence to this, but I think they look rather like poop in how brown and rounded they look. Try using less saturated colours, and (unless you specifically want round, eroded-looking rocks) thinner, sharper highlights and straighter-edged shadows to make them look more like solid chunks of rock.

Edit: Have you tried other hues instead of brown? Maybe something more bluish might fit your sky-island theme better. Don't forget that you don't have to keep all your colours the same hue, you can make different parts of the colour ramp have different hues (e.g. warmer highlights, cooler shadows).


Edited by eishiya - 21 December 2014 at 12:21pm

I think you are, and I've already explained why that is: you don't know what you're trying to make, so you have no sense of direction to go in. "Rocks" is incredibly vague.

Would've helped a lot if you'd specified that from the beginning, and if you'd kept that vision in mind instead of blindly following everybody's advice.

Look at photos of those mountains (to help you find more, try the term "karst", which is a term referring to eroded limestone topography, which includes those karst hills in China). What shapes do they have? What are their textures like? What are the colours like? Draw these hills (not as tilesets, but just to get a feel for how they work/look). In other words, study them. Then, try to develop a tileset out of what you've learned, tiles that can convey the same large features and have a similar-looking texture.

Some particular things to think about that might highlight what's been wrong with your approach:
- why are you using brown? Those karst mountains have a light warm grey colour that looks blue in the distance, this is because they are limestone (other kinds of rock are too hard or too crumbly to form such landforms). Are you letting your preconceived notions ("dirt = brown") override what you see? That is an artist's worst enemy.
- Those mountains tend to be covered with plant life from top to bottom, with small areas of rock visible on the sides. Why are yours bare except for the top? This isn't necessarily a "bad" thing, but it's something you should be thinking about. Are you letting your preconceived notions of a platformer hill ("grass on top, dirt everywhere below") affect your design?
- You've been focusing almost entirely on the texture so far, but karst hills are defined not by their texture, but by their large-scale forms such as caves, big dips, and of course the famed tall, narrow mountains. If those are the kind of landforms you want (which'd lend themselves very well to being platforms in a platforming game!), you should focus on producing the overall effect of them, and worrying about the texture later. Players will focus on the larger features. Again, this is a reason to start with something like a mockup rather than individual little sections.