Fighting game mockup

[HarveyDentMustDie]

Hi guys, some of you maybe saw my Secret Santa gift for this year. Idea was to create action fight game like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat etc. in post apocalyptic scenery.

It was very interesting thing to make cause it was my first mockup with this type of background. I have to give big thanks to wolfenoctis who helped me with background during the process: 



Here's the progress:


And here's the final image:


Now I want to know did I made some big mistake here. Is there any way I could've made this better if I did something different. I know it's not perfect and that's why I want to learn from it.

Thanks in advance.

[Gil]

I think the main thing to improve upon is clusters. There's parts with really nice clusters and then there's parts which feel really noisy (highlights on the car in the background for example. There's some banding going on related to that.

Overall readability might not be optimal for a fighting game, but you'd have to judge that in motion probably. You can easily fade the background a bit to fix that if it's an issue, when actually creating a game.

[HarveyDentMustDie]

You are right, I usually pay attention to clusters but cars were made in 3AM cause I had to deliver image on time.

Regarding brightness of background I thought the same thing but I was afraid that it will be too bright and in games I've mentioned background is very dominant is some levels so I decided it's not so bad thing. I've tried to separate background by using similar tones and desaturated color, while using different and more saturated colors in characters.

PS This is just mockup, game wont be made.

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Here's an edit:


I'd try and watch your single pixel usage, I feel like sometimes you are trying to use a lot more detail than is really attainable, I do the same thing a lot and it just muddies things up. In your image the lightest colors were definitely taking the eye away from the actual characters, same with the darks. A lot of contrast usually signals that something is in the foreground. The background I tried to reduce contrast, and you can use like complementary colors to your advantage if you want something to be close in value but still stand out like the blue and the orange highlights on the car.

I also added outlines to see how they worked because they usually help seperate things from the background.

[Decroded]

[HarveyDentMustDie]

@Mr. Fahrenheit I really like what you did with the background especially purple tones. I'm not big fan of outlines but sometimes they can help. This outline effect reminds me of PC game "XIII". Regarding one pixel use, sometime I can't find the better way to add details which means I need to experiment more. 

@Decroded You are right, this does separate characters better.

Thanks guys. 

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

Yeah i wasnt really sure with the outlines, I hardly ever use them, but I thought I'd try them, and Decroded's edit solves the readability issues really well so it lessens the need for them even more.