AuthorTopic: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds  (Read 11049 times)

Offline Sersch

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[CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

on: July 22, 2017, 05:26:03 pm
I've been working recently on a hill/mountain Platformer tileset + parallax background and wanted to get some Critique/Feedback if i can improve something there

Offline eishiya

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #1 on: July 22, 2017, 06:07:41 pm
The walkable grass blends into the background in many areas, and the rock-grass boundary has too much contrast, so it looks like the rocks are the walkable surface, rather than the grass. In addition, the grass has a lot of contrast and no clear "surface".

I think a fix for both problems is to reduce the contrast within the grass, so it reads more like a lightly textured surface, in contrast to the heavily-textured non-walkable areas and to reduce the contrast within the foreground rocks so they don't distract from the grass. You could also hue-shift the grass more towards yellow and the background slightly more towards blue to get more contrast between them that way. Darkening some of the lighter background colours would also help.

Edit: Put together an edit for you to give you some ideas:

I darkened the nearest background layer, and recoloured the bright background grass with some greens from the trees, so the overall contrast in the background is lower.
I made the grass lighter and yellower, and lightened up the mid green in it so that it doesn't contrast as much with the highlights. I also got rid of the dark shadows in the upper blades of the grass, which reduces the contrast within the grass even further.
I reduced the contrast and colour count in the rocks, and lightened up the area where the rocks meet the grass, so that there's no super-dark separation between the grass and rocks, which I feel helps the ground read more as a connected whole instead of looking like the grass floats above the ground.

Edit 2: I think if you're going to have a light foreground and darkish background, the character sprite could stand to be lightened up too.
« Last Edit: July 22, 2017, 06:37:12 pm by eishiya »

Offline Quake

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #2 on: July 23, 2017, 08:56:12 am
I definitely agree with Eishiya's critique. I'd also potentially lower the contrast of the closest layer of trees, as they could be construed as barriers.

I did an edit using Eishiya's as a base (hope you don't mind). Made the first layer even less bright, and changed the colours of the rocks. Changed the colour of the trees in the background, as well as changed the position of the middle hill because it aligned too 'well' with the layer behind, and so looked weird to me.


Offline Tycho Magnetic Anomaly

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #3 on: July 23, 2017, 12:13:00 pm
really good suggestions by the others, and I would agree the foreground/background contrast needs perhaps a bit more strength. But I think the others have lost a bit of the lushness of your original in particular with the trees, the edits although better in contrast are flatter and less visually striking then the original.  With regard the grass/foreground contrast well its a bit hard to get a measure of that based on static picture, but I am sure when the foreground is moving over the background + the other layers of parallax the contrast isn't quite as lost as the original image.

Offline hexcode

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #4 on: July 25, 2017, 12:33:14 am
Really nice clean stuff! I would say play around with your foreground Pine Tree colors a little more. Try to get the darkest green to blend a more in with the rest of the greens in that tree. I would also make the tree darker in general to give the image more depth.
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Offline Sersch

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #5 on: July 25, 2017, 07:10:12 pm
wow thanks for the detailed feedback, that helps a lot!

I agree the contrast between background and foreground wasn't enough, so here is my edit on it (maybe not as extreme as your overpaints)



also recorded a short gif how it looks with parallaxing:

Offline Quake

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #6 on: July 25, 2017, 07:21:15 pm
Much better!

The game is looking awesome. Keep up the good work.

Offline eishiya

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #7 on: July 25, 2017, 08:35:44 pm
Looks good!
I think the rocks are still too prominent for what they are, though. You could keep the highlights as bright as they are if you keep the area around them a little lighter, the main problem is that you have the highlights right below one of the darkest colours, so there's a lot of contrast in an area that doesn't require it.

Nitpick: The key icon touches the 0, so the whole thing looks like some strange glyph. Space them out a bit so they read better.

This is off-topic, but is there a tutorial or something for programming that style of minimap? I need to code maps like that soon and I'm worried I'll be reinventing the wheel and making it inefficient.
« Last Edit: July 25, 2017, 08:38:53 pm by eishiya »

Offline Sersch

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #8 on: July 25, 2017, 09:17:53 pm
Yeah i think you are right, i gonna make the area above them a bit lighter.
And good catch with the key, i'll ad a pixel space there!

i didn't follow a tutorial for the minimap but i can imagine that there should be something out there. I can share you my code if you're interested (it's C# for Unity)
For every room/area the player visits i basically scan the size and calculate it down to the cell size of the quads cells. I also have to define for every room the rooms position on the minimap.

Offline eishiya

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Re: [CC] Mountain Tiles & Backgrounds

Reply #9 on: July 25, 2017, 10:32:35 pm
Do you mark the entire room as explored when the player enters? I recall Castlevania games mark rooms as explored in square-ish sections, I thought maybe you did it that way. Or is that what you described and I just didn't understand? ¦D

This all is really pushing my brain into coding mode. Thanks! It's been a while since I did any bit-pushing, I've only been pushing pixels recently.