[WIP] RPG battle backgrounds

[StelloHexis]

Hello. I just want to have your opinion on these BG.

[Vinik]

Nice and effective for a gbc tier rpg. Are you using a specific palette? I am not sure about the dark brown on the forest background, but I suppose it works if do not have a darker blue in a very limited the palette. I would go with a low saturated purplish dark blue, which would be the logical sequence for your ramps and probably work well on the other backgrounds as well.

The dungeon one stands out from the others because of the perspective, perhaps you could try similar perspective for the forest and the fiery cave as well.

Edit: this is what I mean:

[StelloHexis]

 I'm using an NES palette. I came up with this for the forest bg.




Which looks better?

[eishiya]

Having shadows that are lighter than the midtones looks weird, so definitely the top one. I'd also perhaps go as far as replacing the background brown with black:


I'm not sure that the dark grey outline on the character is a valid NES colour, is that meant to be the same colour as black?

[StelloHexis]

Ohh!!. You are right. I have been using a darker grey for a while. I have been using it for so long that I thought it was part of the  NES palette.

[StelloHexis]

[eishiya]

Since you have a dark brown to work with, why not use it instead of the orange-black dithering in the background? You definitely have the space in the palettes.

[Vinik]

Sorry I just noticed it was the NES palette after posting . That brown was clashing with the other colors of the background anyway. I cannot think of a suggestion in NES colors other than black like eishiya said. You could also make all the other colors lighter to make room for one of the NES darks, but that would take the focus out of your characters.

However, how set are you in using exclusively NES colors? Please don't take this as an intrusion on your art choices, but, as an example, your game seems quite appealing to my retro tastes, and I certainly wouldn't be turned away if you took liberties with the colors. Perhaps even using a whole alternate NES palette to be harmonious, like those more desaturated NTSC options of modern emulators, I choose them over the "default" one anyday. NES colors wouldn't even look like those we can now see in clear displays. I remember that my tube tv from childhood was way over-saturated and warm by default, and my neighboor's one was much less vivid while still warm and the colors looked much more interesting on his tv set than on my. I think Aseprite has NES NTSC built in if ever wish to give it a try.

[StelloHexis]

@eishiya. Can you give me an example?

@Vinik. The thing is I have already used this set of colors for everything else. But if I have to I'm open to adding a few colors. I will try making it a shade brighter in a few minutes and see how it looks.

[StelloHexis]

AYYYYY!!!!

[eishiya]

The two colours in the background still have similar values and thus look odd. In this case, I think you'd be better off making the trees solid-coloured rather than teal+green.

I'm not sure what you meant when you asked for an example, but here's an edit using brown instead of dithering (on the left only):


And here's an edit replacing the brown with dark red, I think it looks nicer:

[Vinik]

I like it with the new color, and also think eishiya dark red is right on the mark. When I have experimented with GBC swatches and adding an extra shade, I learned that only two extra colors - desaturated darks - one bluish and another redish - are enough to give depth to almost every tight color ramp.

[StelloHexis]

@eishiya. Sorry, I didn't understand. I thought you wanted me to dither the parts in the background so I was confused because I actually tried and it didn't work.

[eishiya]

I like 'em I think  the rocks look very noisy and could use some clean-up. Try to focus on the major planes of the rocks instead of worrying about the "rock texture". If you can get the rocks to look like rocks without texture, you'll find it much easier to add an appropriate texture, or you might even find you don't need any texture.
Think about where the light is coming from. The faces of the rock that face the light most directly will be the lightest colour, the others will be darker, and faces that don't get any light at all, because they're either facing away or because the light is blocked by other rocks, will be darkest.

[StelloHexis]

  How's this?

[eishiya]

Better, but still noisy. Where is the light coming from?

[StelloHexis]

idk im bad at this

[eishiya]

That looks cleaner! And leaving the far rocks fully shaded adds more depth to the scene, good job.
With cleaning, try to eliminate all "orphan pixels", that is pixels unconnected to any cluster, not part of a dither pattern, and which aren't meant to be details.

[StelloHexis]

  Probably nailed it here.

or here lol..(made a few more edits).

[eishiya]

Much better! You've built up a good sense of depth now. Good use of dithering to squeeze an extra dark brown out of your colours, too. Dithering works great when it has enough room to appear like solid colour coverage.

I would critique how none of the rocks seem to have volume (they have details, but no form shadows of their own), but I think with how you've done it so far, adding shadows would just make things too busy-looking, what you have now works well :]

[StelloHexis]

How would I approach this?

[eishiya]

Approach what? My last post was basically saying you're doing great.

[StelloHexis]

  Ohh! Hahaha, thanks! I was asking how I would give volume to the rocks. I think if I edit it more I'm just going to mess it up (idk how to improve it).

[eishiya]

Your lighting seems to be coming directly from the front, which makes it very difficult to give volume. Frontal lighting flattens everything, because there are no visible shadows (the shadows are cast behind the object, where we can't see them). So, if you want more obvious volume, you'd need to change the lighting to be more from above and/or from the side.

[StelloHexis]

Ahh, I see. I will leave it as is since that's what I was going for. The dungeon one looks bad now compared to the rest I'm going to work on that tomorrow.

[Vinik]

If I may add a little suggestion, on the forest background, the first two trees at mid distance looked very nice and got almost obscured by the new closer/larger trees, maybe you would like to bring them a bit more to the center so they appear a bit more from behind the closer trees.

[StelloHexis]

[Vinik]

I think you are set! I was looking into your tileset posts and really liked it, and I must say I am very interested in seeing the final result of your project

[StelloHexis]

  Thanks! I'm trying hard to finish a demo. I'll send you a PM once its set. Thank you all!