Hi, :ouch: I never intended to be away from this as long as I have been, and I do apologise. My reason, put short and sweet, is part time work turned full time hours, and more. I didn't expect to have no time on my hands, which has thrown off all my plans, pixel art aside. So yeah, sob story over, but on the bright side I'm looking forward to a nice hefty pay check.
Tourist, thanks for that awesome post! It's put a lot of things into perspective. I really have no idea what I'm doing. And those images are so inspirational aswell as informative. So much to learn :)
Framing elements to break up the background and suggest where important interactions take place.
I've tried framing certain elements as you suggested, Its tougher than I thought, probably because from the start, the composition I roughed out was poor. I didn't help myself there, and you've given me a few things I'll have to work on in my all my work.
Strong depth cues to suggest a large space even if the character never walks depth-wise into the screen.
I'm still working on this, I've roughed some things into the foreground and I've worked on the background to try and suggest depth. I'm not sure I've achieved this, and I think I'll work more on the transition from foreground to the background right now. It just looks odd, and I don't think having the character where it is now helps either.
Linear elements in the background point along the lines of action, giving subtle cues about what is going to happen next, or where the hero is going to go next.
I'm not to sure how to go about doing this, but I have tried to make sure the path is more prominent than before, so that the player knows what the character can/can't interact with. It's not great yet, but still a work in progress.
I've changed the values around a lot to make everything easier to read, specifically the character sprite. I hope this shows. The most important thing though is that even after doing a lot of work on this today, I can still see what needs a lot of work. Here's the mockup, somewhat revised.
(http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/2817/shadowmockupcopy.png) -> (http://imageshack.us/a/img59/2162/shadowmockup2.png)
Again, thanks for that post, very, very helpful.