my little world, monsters! ... [please C&C]

[zeid]

The colour changes in the edit given are definitely for the better, though a quick tweak to stop it from getting/remaining to washed out is a good idea. This is a rather minor point to bring up and a rather sketchy example:
--->

[pixelaro]

nice colour edit zeid. I agree and think yours is way better, but perhaps taken a little bit to far for my own taste.
Pypebros: in most day scenes from platformers the foreground is actually darker while the background is more washed out and lighter/tinted to blue. One time that you will want the foreground to be lighter than the bg is if you're making a night area.
Basically what trevious said is the truth and science, and what i say is a common way to simplify this and make it even more readable in platformers. generally you would want your foreground to have an as normal as possible range of colours. then the background beeing either greyed and lightened, greyed and tinted to a colour or grayed and darkened.

[Souly]

I noticed how you took bunches of leaves and just layered them.
I just edited off yours.
I took the same bush you used, and changed the pallet to the darkest colors removing the highlight.
Flipped the bush, and then threw some of them behind the rest of the leaves.

[PypeBros]

@souly: interesting trick ^_^ I'll give it a try with reverted tiles going behind the trunk & branches

@zeid: kinda surprised that you actually did an edit with "fg darker than bg" here and another with "bg darker than bg" there...

@pixelaro: yes, i admit the "far = low saturation, low contrast ; near = high saturation, high contrast" thing. Maybe i'm just emotionally bound to bright grass, but i have the feeling that a bush in the background of the scene should send less light to the eye than grass nearby, too. and imho, this is no longer the case with your edit (and the bush is even more gloomy in zeid's edit).

Some pictures (not exactly references, more photos that happen to show something similar to what i have in mind):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/straightfinder/174183291/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/visbeek/2618425424/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/happy_sleepy/2499770237/
(oh, and of course, rayman's primary forest had a strong influence) http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5640/3676/1600/796313/AA1.jpg

Btw, this is supposed to be level 1, a friendly and happy forest. I'll keep the freaky jungle for later on.

Pypebros: in most day scenes from platformers the foreground is actually darker while the background is more washed out and lighter/tinted to blue.

agree for "open" areas, where you see the landscape far away and get direct sunlight, but i wouldn't apply that straight for a scene that takes place in a forest (well, unless i'm wrong to think this, of course)

[ndchristie]

sorry to be the salt to your pinch, this really is not such a great way to make a tree

I kinda blame tsugumo and st0ven for the broccoli-ball-tree plague (and it's sister-strain, the nonsensical blue ambient), but mostly I blame the games that they were referencing.  the 90's was all about how to make the most appealing graphics as fast as possible, which includes a lot of practically "medieval copy-book" type constructions.

Just in an effort to try and dispell this a bit -

1 - few trees branch well above the halfway point.  most branch a third or even a quarter from the ground, and some conifers even lower than that.
2 - most major tree branches seldom, if ever, point inwards, due to the need to collect sunlight.  gravity and such can alter this, but generally, the branches go up and out.  They then form many nets to catch the sunlight, not balls, for the same reason that the tree itself is not a ball, but a giant net - balls cast shade onto most of their leaves.
3 - few trees branch from a single point, with many large branches.  most trees split into only two or three parts at a time.  Most deciduous trees also do not continue to have a large trunk - branching is the whole kit and kaboodle.  every split divides the branch into two or three parts, which serves to divide the major shape of the tree.  round trees tend to branch in roughly equal ratios between branches, while more interesting trees give more energy to one of the new branches.

are there exeptions to these ideas?  of course.  many shrubs are thick-bodied, keeping themselves in shade, and many trees branch high, particularly in regions where climbing animals exist (the trees which are harder to climb tend to survive better because their fruit develops with less interruption).  However, this still doesn't mean that all trees should be broccoli  .

[PypeBros]

grass hurt my eyes.

Well, enough with rumbling and "i prefer it like that" etc. let's try if i can fix those readability and eye-hurting stuff (though you picked an edit where i still had some of this "ugly light-grey-tainted shade of green").
->
* maybe i'm just using a too wide 'band' of the lightest shade in the grass. I tried to slim it (see the cliff) somehow
* clearly, i wasn't using enough shades in the "leaves chunk". I changed it and introduced a touch of dark-blue to increase contrast (/me partly convinced only)
* i pushed some more dark pixels on the right of the left trunk and between its roots. Maybe i need to have a larger "shadow" area ?
* maybe having a band of lightest shade in the grass is a completely bad idea. I removed it and replaced with few "highlighted hair of grass" here and there.

@ndchristie: your description of trees sounds interesting. I'll read that thoroughly a bit later. From my observations, how tree branches depends most of their environment (standalone trees tends to maximize the volume they can exploit, being less engaged in a "race towards the sky"), and i find trees that have many branches at a low level, preferrably grouped more interesting. Anyway, i'm not exactly trying to mimmick mother nature here. Branches and leaves are platforms here, and trunks are impassable wall, so the trees are really part of the level design.

@pixelaro: oh, yes, i noticed your edit on the apple too. i'll have to study it later and find out whether i prefer it or not and how i can improve mine (obviously, i want to keep its round shape).

PS: sorry if i seem to stick on such "incremental" edits. I'm mostly trying to find the right path to take before i can go on and to a major revision of my tileset...

[ndchristie]

I'd urge you to look into ways that allow you to make platforms without looking stiff.  This is the purpose of good graphics - to create structure without being restricted by it.

sloppy 5-minute attempt :

[PypeBros]

so if i interprete your sketch correctly, you suggest things like a tree that starts blocking (high contrast) and is inclined backwards so that it's no longer a wall after a certain height, right ? and it has a branch pointing towards the screen between the two (which is a platform in the yellow-box).

It also had two branches on the left and the right (red boxes) that are walkable platform, but the highest branch is moving backwards too (low contrast) so it's not walkable by the player (it could be a booby trap, though).

Yeah, that could be interesting things. I don't know if i'm capable of drawing something like that yet, but it is definitely a good idea. (somehow reminds me of flashback's jungle

[PypeBros]

--
I don't have my "rayman-like" animator yet, so i'm stuck to "regular" animation in a 16x16 grid, but anyway. I had fun making Bilou walk and roll (on floor, or maybe spin in the air ... not yet decided).

Any comment on that ?

[zeid]

Sorry for such a late reply. No edit this time either I am afraid.

@zeid: kinda surprised that you actually did an edit with "fg darker than bg" here and another with "bg darker than bg" there...

Well I never said that a light background was wrong or a darker one was wrong. It is all completely dependent on the mood you are trying to set, with the trees and colouring you provided I assumed you wanted a lighter background. Typically when someone wants to create a happy upbeat forest they choose a brighter sunny background where as the jungle scene I made the edit for has canopies blocking out much of the light and creating a completely different atmosphere and environment.

You can create the game environment however you please but I do think that the colours you have now need some reworking at this stage. The foreground is probably in more fault then the background as it doesn't currently have as wide a range of highlights and shadows as it should, in the recent edit when you add the darker blue shadows to the trees, the readibility level of the scene improves. You pretty much need to apply this kind of effect on the entire forground (including characters). The higher the range is in the foreground, the more range you can put into the background. This will make ndchristie's suggestion of making things look more organic and natural a lot easier.

The most important reason we make the background more washed out isn't because it is more realistic, it is usually more of a readibility thing then anything else. Other such ways include increased/decreased luminosity and increased/decreased detail. You can also use +/- hue. However if you are hoping for a wide variety of colours as oppose to a pong game you are going to want a combination of these things.

I think the walking animation looks nice, you should research a little "sub-pixeling". Particularly sub-pixel techniques concerned with animation. That way you can get some of the motions such as that of the eyes to look smoother.