I was working on one of these, started 2 weeks ago, but forgot about it.
Tried to go back to it yesterday, as I remembered about it, but everything I did for it looked rather rushed, and ended up feeling ill from a cold I was carrying since a few days ago.
Anyway, I'll just post the wip of what I had.



So far it only uses one palette row.
The road tiles were made multi-tileable for creating different cracks and effects using the less amount of tiles.

Anyway, good luck to everyone that is participating.

I would contravertially say that for me this is hands down the winner... even though it's not completed - the choice of color pallette, the placement of pixels I can tell immediatly that panda has underlying skills that I believe are close to professional... with respect to background development that is... well done panda!

I think this is a tremendous effort, Just superb... I love the fact he's managed to develop the cracks so that he can create 4 varying types over a larger 2x2 tile area - that shows skills with understand tesselation as well as being economic with the character coun -  I love the end piece on the brick work as it juts out into that gap... the way it sticks out to 'counter' the obviousness of the tile boundaries, which I feel a lot of the others here don't successfully manage to remove.

Finally, I love the painterly subtle style - notice the lack of intense dark colors (such as black) this pushes the background INTO the background, which allows game sprites and any HUD to stand out on top of it... which is good for gameplay. - I always prefer backgrounds to be less saturated and less contrasting.

Taken to it's ultimate conclusion I beleive this would really suit a "modern" beat em up game that was perhaps based on something like justice league or the x-men... or the mutant turtles... Particularly with bright vibrant 'cel shaded' style combatants over the top of it...

Plus he's only used 1 pallette row so far...

Simply Stunning.

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Vedstens work is also great. nice pallettes, Entry A & C particularly... I think B could be desaturated and the contrast reduced slightly also... but that's personal choice. (See my comment above)
out of the three I'd rank them in order of merit - A 1st, C 2nd (purely for it's simplicity), with B 3rd ... mainly because of the contrast and choice of colors set's it down a few pegs.

All in all though a great effort.

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I also think the texture in Vierbits offering is really nice... personally I prefer the more flat color work but your work is excellently done and also quite professional. It has elements of Metal Slug About it... (praise indeed)

Another good pixel pusher. Well Done Vierbit.

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With regards to those of you who think I'm being harsh, I apologise - I've been on these boards now for 3 days and I'm still yet to gain the 'vibe' of the place so I'm sorry if I've offended any of you.

However - having said that - I do have a significant understanding of this medium and this format particularly and In all honesty I'm making these comments in a bid to help you all understand the rules of this contest and ultimately win it... as adam points out, those of you who have illustrated their choice of pallette are the safest - I'm just a stickler for pallette management having stayed up to the early hours on too many times to mention, correcting pallette errors that my old art team had incorporated into their work...

But I get your point about the fun factor and I'll bear it in mind in future.

Thanks and Good luck.

oh boy... this looks like fun...

FINAL thing
just a few color tweaks and 2 new tiles. That's it
pic>>

tiles>>


oh and 13 colors

Hi niss...

The amount of colors your using really shows, (in a negative way) - I think that one of the technicle points of this excercise is to demonstrate the understanding of using mulitiple pallettes across a character mapped image. Background development on GBA isn't the same as producing a sprite that may (or may not depending) be in 16 colors.

Each Character square can consist of 16 colors taken from a bank of 16 pallettes making a total of 256 color indexes. Certain restrictions are applied prior to development (depending on what else you may want to display on the screen using the screen pallette) so it's generally a good a idea to keep your color use as economic as possible. But I think 13 colors is perhaps a little too economic.

If you have a look at neverest's post you will see how he/she has arranged 4 'banks' of 16 colours.

A good Background artist needs to understand this. Color sharing across banks is also important if you want to blend from one pallette range to another. This is also demonstrated in neverest's image, although he/she has taken full advantage of this sharing which is evident in the straight edges - (having said that it's nice work)

he says..."Each tile can have a maximum of 15 colors in it (this is one 'pallette row'). The scene can have a maximum of 10 different pallette rows across all tiles"

This means you can have 10 banks of 16 (or 15 as adam more correctly puts it) colors. 150 colors in total.

It's a shame as you've made such a good effort but I think you perhaps misunderstood Adam's description?

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I've just had a look at a few of these images and it seems that the pallettes aren't arranged well in a number of them?

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I hope it's not just me but the majority of these backgrounds don't conform to a GBA pallette structure. Now, call me mean but in my opinion, regardless of how good they look should any of these go through for consideration?! I am mean aren't I? but I've read the rules and the reason why I didn't enter is because I know how tediously complicated background development can be with regards to making the pallettes work correctly across the character squares and tiles (someone in the know back me up on this one - Ptoing? Adam!?) - if this comp was purely on asthetics then most of these are strong contenders, but as is so often the case people overlook the underlying technicle elements because you can't SEE them... or because they don't understand... but take it from me it's important to understand... particularly if you want to win this contest.... or more importantly making sure that the art in question would work on a GBA!? which in most cases here present... they wouldn't...

yes I am mean aren;t I!?

yeah... you're right... how's about this?

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added... smoke and neckercheif and fattened that back leg up...