I kinda liked the old textures/colors on the yellow parts of the house before. Bricks are much better now.

Fool's old website (down now I believe) had a great set of house animations, some details I remember was a water drain/pipe going down, a rooster (?) coming out of a window, etc.

I think with the palette you've chosen, there's almost no way to get a totally realistic look, so you should go and exaggerate things to make assets more interesting. Somewhere along the way you lost the charm that the flags on the roof and the pointy wood planks added to the atmosphere.

Edited by DatMuffinMan - 04 December 2014 at 8:14pm

I agree with dmm and I still think the rocks looked the best on your nov. 27th post

What's making the banner move under the beam instead of just hanging down from it? xP

I think you have a lovely style happening here, but it sounds like cartoony isn't what you're aiming for? I think it all so far fits together well and matches the character art. If you want a less cartoony look, you'll probably want finer textures (no large-scale details, e.g. no giant curves in that wood, no big rocks in the wall texture) and duller colours. However, I think the style as-is, especially with the current wall textures on the fronts of the buildings, has a lot of charm and reads very well.

The grey walls look odd. I think the previous colours worked fine. If the walls felt bland, consider adding some details like a big crack in the plaster or some farm tools propped against the wall.

As much as I love turf roofs, I think they look out of place here, especially if they're not platforms you can jump onto. Since the grass-green is, at least in this area, a dominant "walkable" colour, the grassy roofs immediately read as also walkable. If you really want to keep the turf despite that (or if it is walkable) but make it more believable - give it more thickness! Grass needs dirt to grow in, and will tend to grow/overhang beyond its container instead of being bound neatly by it.

I like the rock colour. It's less rock-like, but I think it matches the warmth of everything else in the scene better. Maybe you could try having a mix of brown and grey? It might end up too distracting, but I think it's worth a shot.

By the way, about making it clear that you can walk past the rock-pillars: how about making the interior black, but having texture closer to the bottoms of the pillars, perhaps even with some grass growing up onto the rocks, to show that it's a smooth transition and not a wall? Having that extra grass would make the walkable grassy area a little wider and thus more noticeable, as well.


Edited by eishiya - 05 December 2014 at 2:51pm

Hey man, this looks really cool.

Just want to point out a few things that stand that I think can be quickly remedied. I've circled them in red and numbered them.


1. I really like the support beam, don't think it would hurt to do it on the lower part of the building too.

2. The building looks like 2 entities rather than one. A shadow might help, removing the beam there would definitely help.

3. This ones not so much a problem, I've seen snake use this to great effect in owlboy so far, but I guess the question is where and how to use it. I don't have this answer, but it doesn't look quite right yet.

4, Looks flat, needs a bit of refinement to match the light source used on the house. Right now it creates a bit of an optical allusion in that its hard to see where it is in the foreground.

Also theme wise, adding grass on top of the beams might add to the look and design of the house.

Got super busy on the weekend D:

@eyshia
I was thinking it was draping over the wooden supports or something like that -but it doesn't sound like it looks like that though :(

Well, my plan was more-or-less trying to get something that looked similar to Chasm or Owlboy in terms of style. Not exactly realistic, but not totally cartoony, however I don't want everything to be washed out with no colour either :l I'm sure I'll find the style that I'm looking for as I make more progress though. I'm going to try to keep everything as it is atm, then go back to it after I pump out some more things.
Farm tools are a bit of a hassle since I'm not using outlines, and the colours that make up the tools would be pretty similar to the colours used on the house, so I'm still thinking about that.

I made the grey walls a bit more blue, does it still not look right? I was trying to get some cold colours for the shadows.

And that is a fantastic idea! That could totally sell the illusion of making the player think they could walk past it. I'm going to keep that in mind!

@Limes
NOOooo! Don't die limes! :P

@Damian
Thanks for pointing those things out! I tried touching down on all the things you circled. For no.3 though, I just didn't add a rocky texture there before posting :P But does the blue just not look right in general?

I ditched the rock sticking out, but I'm also going to put that on hold because I'm getting to the point where I really need to move on to other assets (explained further down)

I'm not sure if I completely understood what you meant by no.1, did you mean make another beam above the door?

I did get rid of the beam in no.2 but it still doesn't look fully connected (will be working on that more).

@Mr.Fahrenheit

Yeah, but you did give me something to consider though. It's not like any of this stuff is final, I'll more than likely be redoing the rocks all over again, so it might just turn out looking a bit like the older tiles.



I also started working on the interior which I'll try to get to a more presentable stage before posting. However, since this has already taken up a huge chunk of time I think I'm going to start working on other things (related to this project of course), then re-iterate on them in the future to make them look better. Because I mean, if it takes this long to make just one asset, I don't think I have much of a chance at making a whole game, so maybe it would just be better to pump out a lot of assets and then go back over them later, even if I'm not totally happy with the current state of how things look.

Edited by ADrawingMan - 09 December 2014 at 2:54am

The blue shadows look too much like those walls are painted a different colour, rather than being the same yellowish colour in open (blue) shade. Those shadows would be appropriate for a white building, but are just too different to read as shadows for the yellowish colour.
Unfortunately, yellow tends to turn to unsightly greyish browns in open shade, which is why in artwork they're usually shaded with reds and purples instead of blues, even if it's not entirely consistent with everything else. It tends to look fine as long as it reads as "cooler" than the lit sides, even if it's not actually "cold".
On a related topic: two sections of the house still don't feel connected, because you're jumping from cool shadow to warm shadow. There's no reason that the shadows on the fronts should be different from the shadows on the sides, use the same colours for them. The texture should provide sufficient visual interest. If the values aren't dark enough, then try adding an extra shade. If it all feels too warm, you could make all the shadows slightly cooler. Don't treat the sides as being in totally different lighting conditions, that's the important thing.

I think your updated roofs look fine, and having them mostly in shadow helps them read as non-walkable. Great job on that! I think it's fine that the grass is visible on the far side of the roof, but maybe it should be pulled back a little bit. To look the way it does, it'd need to be growing downwards on a vertical surface, which grass doesn't tend to do.

Edit: As for cartooniness: what makes your houses look cartoony is those curved wooden beams. They don't read as realistic, so they read as cartoony. Those shapes are possible, but are impractical to produce, so you only see them on buildings meant to be shown off. Curves on wooden function-oriented buildings are produced from multiple straight sections instead. Perhaps that could help you with making it feel less cartoony?


Edited by eishiya - 09 December 2014 at 7:03am