Hey all its been awhile I know (computer breakdown). I decided to take a break from my main project and work on this weird surreal themed game... what I have here is a strange merge between aboveground and underwater scenery and more land based physics...

What do you think about it? how can I improve it? I need a few pointers on the leaves of that tree, I wanted The leaves of that tree to look "furry" I'm not so sure I got the desired effect...

Current State:

Edited by Turon - 23 June 2015 at 12:46am

Have you ever played "Kirby's Mass Attack"? The ground is supposed to be along the side so all those bits of grass and flowers are growing out of a steep incline like a "green wall".

Do I make the foreground dark and the background light or is it the other way round?

Pay attention to the desaturation on more distant objects.

Shall I also put sections of exposed rock on the clifface to remind players it's a sidescroller?

Hows this then? I've fixed the color.

er... what do you mean by "3/4"? is it an angle?

Edited by Turon - 19 May 2015 at 12:06pm

Contrast is the difference between the colours of things (value contrast, the difference between light and dark, is the biggest issue in your case). Higher contrast makes things read more clearly, but it's distracting. So, you want less contrast in the background, so that the foreground reads clearly against it.

By 3/4 I mean the viewing angle, yes. Your flowers look like they're viewed from directly above, even though the rest of the scene is in profile/side-on view.

heres a big image I made to explain everything you need to know.  In the top part of the image I just sampled light and shadow colors from the foreground and background, in your image and in a photograph.

Compare the value contrast of the light and shadow colors between the foreground and background in the photo, to yours.  You can easily see in the photo there is more contrast in the foreground, the shadows are much darker.

As things get further away, you can basically imagine a semi-transparent layer of sky color covering things.  The further away things are, the more opaque this sky layer will be, until they are so far away the sky layer is 100% opaque and you cannot see them at all.

I demonstrate this in the second part of the image, by actually putting semi transparent layers of sky color of the images at 20, 40 and 60% opacity.

In the third part of the image I compare the colors I sampled from the foreground on the photo earlier, with the colors sampled from the background, and a new set of colors sampled from the foreground image with a layer of 60% opacity sky over it. 

You can see that the colors we got just by putting that transparent layer over the foreground are pretty close to what the background colors actually are.

of course, you dont have to make your background colors by strictly applying transparent layers over the foreground, you have more freedom to do what you want in art, but it should serve as a good general guideline.




Edited by r1k - 22 May 2015 at 2:37pm

oops, youre right I did, I think I flipped all the text horizontally after I put them in place.  updated the image to fix it.

I agree that you should change the background colour.

It looks very unnatural being that dark. In reality, the sky doesn't tend to be so dark near the horizon due to dust, water, etc in the atmosphere, it's only that saturated overhead, where there are fewer such particles in the way. So, while the colour itself isn't necessarily unrealistic, it looks weird because humans aren't used to seeing that colour in that context, humans are used to a paler sky closer to the horizon.

I have been focusing on the sky/ocean/whatever and the color is lighter at the bottom and darker further up.
I'd admit that the color of the the coral thingies might suck a bit now...

There's no "sky" underwater.
To be honest, since the beginnig I've been unable to tell whether this is meant to be underwater, or a sea-inspired non-underwater scene. You have what look like land plants all over the place, but the background rocks look underwater. You also have those white things that look like clouds.

Underwater, you're right that the water gets darker the deeper it goes, but in a shallow area (such as around a coral reef), there isn't enough of a depth difference to make a noticeable transition. Instead, it's air bubbles and sand/dirt that create the gradient, by the same process as in the sky above the water. So, the "water" will be coloured more similar to the dirt closer to the horizon because we're seeing through more suspended particles, and closer to the sky colour directly overhead because we're seeing through fewer suspended particles. it's not about up or down, it's about how much crud is in the way. It's also not about lighter or darker, but about the colour of the crud.


Edited by eishiya - 26 May 2015 at 7:06am

I've Changed the flowers a bit...

yes the Octopus.. I came up with this one gameplay concept and made a alpha of "Octopus Game", I wasn't happy with a few concepts of the design so I forgot it for awhile, But now I'm recoding the game and giving it a new and better look like what I have shown you and the Octopus you see is basically a remnant of the old project and I do plan on Making a few tweaks to the sprite of even replacing it with a new one...

Edited by Turon - 22 June 2015 at 9:24am

I've been playing around with the background a bit, what do you think?

I've made the hills smaller I'll neaten things up further shortly, but as for now what are your thoughts?

Do I get ride of the darker shade of the lighter shade or the highlight?

So you say it'll look better with 2 colors instead of 3? I don't really understand but what do you make of this?

will the ground look better with more rock?