GAME MOCKUP - Color pallete issues

[Fly]

Hey guys... Working on a little project, but I'm running into some serious problems with my colors. I've never been good at creating an effective palette, as you can see in the image below.

This piece is heavily inspired by Vierbit and Slym, I appreciate the help they've given me...but they are pretty busy folks and I hardly get to talk to them about getting some pointers on this.

Would anyone mind helping me figure out the issues I have here?




1 thing that is really important is to keep the black area right around the edge of the rocks... This has to do with some transparency issues with the water in a program. -- Hard to explain, but please consider this black unavoidable.

--- The blue squiggly line is water

[halffish]

What are you talking about... I kind of like the color, especially in those layers of background trees...

[Fly]

What are you talking about... I kind of like the color, especially in those layers of background trees...

Thank you halffish. I really appreciate the positive feedback. I just feel like the colors are off somehow..I don't know why. Maybe it's because I've been staring at it for months

[Dusty]

What's going on with the horizontal stripes of pixels on the foreground trees? I find them pretty visually distracting and I'm not sure what they're supposed to be adding to the trees. Also the grass is just... cut off. Definitely needs more shape to it so it doesn't look artificial.

Color-wise I think maybe it could be more vibrant. When I see trees and overgrowth like that I think healthy nature. However the colors of the canopy and grass look almost brown, as though it's all dead. You might also want to try shifting your darker shades of green to blue, rather than yellow.

I'm also a little confused by the two types of trees you have here. You have a clearly much larger set of background trees that look very nice and natural, but the foreground tree is smaller and straight as a ruler. Why not incorporate the platforms and branches into the background trees, rather than having two different types of trees going on? Besides that the foreground tree appears to be floating, and the shade of brown is rather sickly in my opinion.

[Fly]

What's going on with the horizontal stripes of pixels on the foreground trees? I find them pretty visually distracting and I'm not sure what they're supposed to be adding to the trees. Also the grass is just... cut off. Definitely needs more shape to it so it doesn't look artificial.

The horizontal pixels were an attempt at exploring new styles. That's actually one of the main things I like about the trees, hehe.. Almost all of the rest I don't really like.

I'm totally going to add more thickness to the floor tiles. This is a pretty early on version. I just wanted to tackle the color issues first, before moving forward anymore.

Color-wise I think maybe it could be more vibrant. When I see trees and overgrowth like that I think healthy nature. However the colors of the canopy and grass look almost brown, as though it's all dead. You might also want to try shifting your darker shades of green to blue, rather than yellow.

Thanks, I'll try that.

I'm also a little confused by the two types of trees you have here. You have a clearly much larger set of background trees that look very nice and natural, but the foreground tree is smaller and straight as a ruler. Why not incorporate the platforms and branches into the background trees, rather than having two different types of trees going on? Besides that the foreground tree appears to be floating, and the shade of brown is rather sickly in my opinion.

This was more of a practical mockup. We're sticking the tiles into an engine and messing around with them. So I don't really know how I could make the platforms work on the background. It will parallax freely from the area where the sprite will move. If you could give me an example, I would love to see how it could be done.  --- As for the straight as a ruler trees..That's just all I could think to do for easy tiling. Any help on that would be awesome too.

[Fly]

update, changed the ramp from yellow to blue on the leaves in the foreground and canopy.

This looks much nicer Dusty..Thanks for that input.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

The character is in a sort of uncanny valley with the anatomy. The arms should be longer, and the chest shouldn't be as wide. I see what you are saying about the colors though. I'd say that the best color choices so far are the plants at the bottom of the bright tree. I think you might be going a little extreme on the hue shifting. Try to get some deeper shades that are dark and saturated. Look at some of Mrmo's pieces on pixeljoint.

[Ashbad]

I like this very much, but I find the layers of trees and foliage in the background to be visually distracting, though this is probably more subjective.  Example of less layers:

[PypeBros]

my only concern so far is the very "pilar" shape of the front tree. If I read your scene correctly, it should mostly be a non-interactive element to justify the presence of the branches platform. So you can go wild and make it a bit more organicly twisting to make it integrate the rest of the piece better.