[CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

[Bearbear65]

You're probably my favorite artist 
Love you work!

[Sersch]

thanks!

@eishiya:
ah i forgot to mention the explore part, i do mark single cells as explored. For that i calculate down the player position to the cell coordinates, basically dividing his position by (30 * 16) on the x axis and (20 * 16) on the y axis (because 1 cell on the minimap is considered a 30 * 20 tiles room and every tile is 16 pixel width/height)

[eishiya]

Do you do that for every step the player takes, or only at certain times or...? That's the main part that's been puzzling me. Seems like a waste to calculate it repeatedly but I can't think of any other way other than invisible trigger walls in each room.

[Sersch]

No it is calculated every frame, but this kind of calculation is peanuts for any PC. I think a common mistake in programming is trying to optimize preemptively in places that don't actually need optimization. I wouldn't care too much about wasted performance beforehand, getting code done bug free and more simple/readable/understandable (even for yourself, you want to understand what you coded in some places a year or so ago) are far more important. Once you start running into performance issues you can still optimize your code. There are different profiling technique/tools that help you analyze which part of the code takes the most performance and that is the place you want to optimize. Usually those are code parts that are getting called hundred or thousand of times per frame. So anything that gets called just once per frame is usually not an issue

[eishiya]

I'm used to working with JavaScript, where a few extra divisions every frame are a problem xP But the project where I need the maps isn't JS so you're right, I should stop worrying about it.

[Sersch]

Worked on some deco objects for the mountain area:





Will probably add some more variations for plants and flowers

[eishiya]

The outlines on the big rocks look good against the trees, but make the rocks look blurry against the dark dirt. Outlines should generally be darker than any of the abutting colours, or they create that blurry look. The solutions to this problem are to use your darkest background colour as the outline, or to not use an outline at all. I think the latter is the best option, since the other objects in the environment don't have outlines.

The dark, cool green on the prop plants looks a bit out of place with the rest of the foreground being warm. Consider using some of the warm colours from your grass instead - that way the plants won't pop too much, but won't look as misplaced:


Your floating rocks at the top and rocks on the side of the cliff and in the background rocks have some single-pixel noise you might want to fix. Also one of those flowers is totally floating off the top of the ground xP

I think it looks a bit odd that the background rock structure has warmer colours than the foreground rocks, whereas the rest of the background gets cooler the further it goes. Shouldn't the rock structure also be cooler if it's in the background?

[Sersch]

thanks once again for the extensive feedback!
I was in a rush to post it here before going to work, so some obvious things slipped through

I do struggle a bit to find the right middle ground for background objects in regards to saturation, i think i might have tried to hard for the plants (reused colors from the far away background objects) and to little for the rocks?

here is a small experiment of swapping the colors of the both rock layers, but i think that doesn't look any good:



also tried to reduce the saturation of the red rocks and increase it for the brown rocks a little bit:



i think it does look better.

[eishiya]

I actually think the red looks pretty good in the foreground, but the brown doesn't work for the background because the contrast is too high, and the brown is still too warm.

How about something like this?

I used your original rock colours and made the background rocks more purple (cooler) and less saturated. I also made the prop rocks use the foreground colours, since they're in the foreground.
Lastly, I made the highlights on the foreground rocks less prominent, as I think they're too distracting.

Edit: Or maybe this? This uses the foreground rocks as the starting colour, but makes them greener/bluer and less saturated, so that they still look like the same type of rock as the foreground rocks:

[Sersch]

I do think approach in your second screen looks kinda cool as well, but i will probably stick to red.

I think using the brown tones for the decoration rocks is a good idea. Although while they are in the foreground, they are still a bit behind the player (he can't collide with them) - so not sure if it makes it a bit harder for the player to see the actual terrain he can walk on?

Also the background rock layer is supposed to "hold" the floating foreground rocks, if i try to make it appear more in the background (by reducing saturation or use more colors) they also look more disconnected, not sure how of important that factor is?