Okay...  What I'm probably gonna do later...

1) Say "screw it" and assume the playing board is physical, and the characters will cast shadows over it, and nerf the sci-finess of it.

2) Enlarge the screen (although I won't go for a super dramatic effect).

Looking back on earlier versions where the colors are much darker than they are now and thinking about past lighting conditions I've done (as a side note: I will never dither like that again), I can see where my mistakes and habits have come from in terms of lighting.  I also need to fix a palette that I pull a lot of colors from.

Either way, I think the point is ultimately that a lot of background elements are too strong, and need to be nerfed.



I pushed the two big lights more towards the back, and with the new implied distance I was able to have another light where the close spotlight used to be, to help have something to fill negative space and frame the image.

I'm trying to imply that the grid is sort of glowing without it being distracting.  Unfortunately the shading here might be banding, and I'm not sure what to do about that (I also might not have cleaned up a lot of dirty artifacts that may exist by the grid lines.)

Started adding more colors.  Unfortunately this leads to a lot of colors currently underused as a result, and a lot of straight ramps (but I can adjust the hues later on once a lot of the colors find their uses and I start intermixing ramps).

I also have to apologize, but despite it being better to have warm colors up front, I just love the kind of atmosphere the warmer colors of the holographic backdrop behind the monster has.  Making the castle very light was an accidental decision.

Again, very incomplete and a lot of messy clusters here and there still.

I also want to note: I'll be adding outlines last or close to last, as a sort of cherry on top of a finished cake once I get everything else working.

UPDATE



This is still extremely messy and still very incomplete because I was changing a bunch of stuff at once and still working out how I want to do things, and I only now made some major changes in the last couple of hours.

Biggest change is that I removed the little pillars at the corners and between walls, creating a lot of mess.  I just didn't think they were appropriate in the end.  I also had the idea of lining the walls with green lines to show that they are part of the game's grid.

For the floor tiles, I don't think I want to gradiate towards darkness, since the game board is probably technically a light source, but I'm thinking of doing where each tile darkens towards the center like you would see in Metal Gear Solid VR Training missions (two of the tiles show this, just two for now in case I change my mind or get a better suggestion).

I tried to make Kaiba at his dome more perceivable and not a part of the Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon.  I haven't made that part very clean yet though.

As for colors, I did desaturate the 2nd lightest blue (thinking of undoing that) and saturate a lot of the darker colors, but I don't think I want to darken that color just yet.

Yeah, I plan keeping the floor tiled like a virtual grid.

What bugs me right now is that something below the screen (?). Is that some sort of monster? It doesn't read very well, and at first glance I thought it was part of the screen due to the colors being used both in that object and in the screen. You should definitely work on separating these two.

I'm not sure which thing you mean (one of them I haven't started cleaning up yet).  Whenever I post an update you'll have to tell me if I did better on that.