[WIP][C+C] Roguelike mockup

[Cyanblue]

Greetings, I've decided to come out of my constant lurking to finally share something with the community.

I've been working for a few days on tiles and sprites for an imaginary roguelike, I tried to make them considerably more cartoony than tilesets roguelikes use(when they aren't ASCII characters), and I'd like some help and comments from you people. So here are some pixels:

this is the player character base


There tends to be a lot of character customization in roguelikes, so ideally I'll make many different kinds of clothing to be worn. Meanwhile, here's some basic clothing for the character


I'm sure you all figured out by now that all the power comes from the scarves.

I also made some basic tileset mockups
   

And some scenery, just because I felt like making it

   

That's it for now.

Something I specially want to know about is what do you think about the perspective of the walls. I used a weird fake perspective that doesn't really make much sense, to keep the wall sections inside their 32x32 tile size. I think it works well but I might be completely wrong, it's really hard to know after working on it for a while...
I'd really appreciate comment or advice about anything and everything, since I have basically no experience with them pixels.

Thank you for your time.

[Phlakes]

That really, really needs some contrast. I won't go into anything else yet, just get some shadows and delicious saturation in there.

[Cyanblue]

I see...

Well, actually, I don't see
I've noticed before people saying the same thing about sprites that seemed completely fine to me (that other people had made), so I guess it's a problem I have? They look good to me, though I can see the contrast is low... is that necessarily a bad thing?

Anyway, since I asked for it I won't just ignore advice, so I made some extremely quick and lazy photoshop edits to know if they look any better to you or not.

This still looks good to me, though I'm not sure if it's better than the original version


This is at the point where it starts looking far too contrasted to me


Of course, I assume carefully picking new colours to contrast better would end up looking much better than a quick photoshop adjustment, but that'd probably take more time...
So, um. Any more feedback ?

[Phlakes]

You need more vibrant colors and more range in the palette. Did a quick edit (and these aren't very good colors, just there for demonstration)-



This makes it a lot easier to see that the original looks like it has a heavy grey filter over it.

[Cyanblue]

Oh god, my eyes...

Now I can't understand how I didn't see it before, does this happen often ?

Anyway, I tried to actually pick some new colours this time around, hopefully this is much better...



Thank you for the advice, I'm already glad I asked for help in here.

[Phlakes]

Better, but the palette still needs some range. Get those darks darker and the lights lighter.

[Cyanblue]

Here we go again...!



What do you think now?

I really appreciate the help, bye the way <3

[r1k]

i think you could reduce the contrast on the floor, as all the brick lines just add unneeded noise.  then you could benefit from adding lighting, so that certain sides of the wall are in shadow, and add cast shadows on the ground. edit:

[QuaziGNRLnose]

Your palette is too much of a 'boring' colour ramp.

what you need is hue shifting



something like that (by Syosa btw), instead of something like

████

throw some colour in man!

[QuaziGNRLnose]

*delete this* accidental quote

[Cyanblue]

I tried adding some more blue to the palette


It's nothing too dramatic, but hopefully it's better.

I also lowered the contrast on the floor tiles.

You could benefit from adding lighting, so that certain sides of the wall are in shadow, and add cast shadows on the ground. edit:

While it really helps give a sense of volume and looks good generally speaking, I wonder if it should be done in this case, because roguelikes are mostly indoor dungeons with small sources of light, I've seen quite a few use dynamic lighting that comes from the player, so that would probably look odd if put together with this kind of shadows... Though if most people in here think I should try it anyway I guess I should.

[jams0988]

While it really helps give a sense of volume and looks good generally speaking, I wonder if it should be done in this case, because roguelikes are mostly indoor dungeons with small sources of light. . . .

Well, that's the thing...right now, I'm not seeing any light sources (torches, etc), and the room overall looks very bright. The tiles would probably look really cool if you made everything really dark and moody and added torches or whatever to all the walls, with shadows all over the bricks and stuff, but that'd be much harder than what you're doing right now (I know I couldn't handle it - I'm trying right now!)

Without any light sources showing, I think you should use the shadows r1k did. Besides looking less plain, they also help the walls look like they're more attached to the floor. Also, I think those sorts of ground shadows will help with readability a lot, especially in tight corridor areas - the blue tileset you keep showing, with the bookcases and such everywhere for example, I have no idea what's going on on the bottom of those pictures. I can't tell where the walls end/start, or whether they're supposed to be higher than the other walls. The whole thing looks like an optical illusion, hahah! It actually reminded me of one of those impossible "how many legs does this elephant have?" pictures. It's because without shadows on the floor, your blue walls very easily read as holes instead of walls (at least to me). Your red stone walls don't suffer from the same problem, because the texture of the walls make it obvious that the stones are overlapping, where the flat blue bricks don't do that.

Anyway, pretty cool tileset. It's very easy on the eyes, and looks interesting enough. =)

[Cyanblue]

Well, I spent some time really trying to figure out how to make the palette more interesting and after a lot of trial and starting the palettes all over again, hopefully I ended up with something good enough to actually use...




I also made a little mockup of how the lighting would work. It's basically some very basic line of sight dynamic lighting where tiles are shaded individually depending on how far they are from the character.
The one on the left is r1k's edit with the shadows being drawn on the tileset, on the right is the edit Phlakes did, which r1k's based his shadow edit on.



I think the pre-rendered shadows don't make any sense if put together with the dynamic lighting, but I'd like your opinion.

Any further advice will be apreciated