I've been thinking I would apply a foreground layer for some shading/lighting effects, but I didn't include it in these pictures because it doesn't look right in its current form.
I figure a layer effect would work better because one, it could darken the sprites too, because honestly it looks weird when the character is so much brighter than the world, and two, since I'm not going to have any paralax scrolling for the background, I have a second layer to work with anyway.
It's good to see how much other people find this important too.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
Changes include:
-Darkening the far background
-Hue shifting it to differentiate it from the solid foreground
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-Added shadows and highligts to the far background, mostly in relation to the solid foreground but also within and in relation to the pillar and the torch.
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-Hue shifted a few blocks in the walls to differentiate them
I do love the results you have produced with all of this, but I'm a little apprehensive toward making too many of these changes. Granted, I'm not actually encoding all of this onto a SNES ROM, but I still want this to look like something accurate to the era. I've even been reducing everything to a 15-bit color depth. It doesn't really look like it, but that pillar uses the same palette as the wall behind it, and both of the wall sections in the second image are using the same palette as well.
And all these changes you've made have noticeably increased the number of colors in the palette, and I think how many colors are used in 8x8 tiles too.
They look great though, so I'm kinda staring at this and thinking: what changes are the most important? Which new colors are the most worth adding?
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Still after that, i colour replaced one of the red/browns in the same background portion with a purple to make that colour colder, and the whole texture more dynamic.
Oh that looks great. This is the color-picking stuff I never manage to pull of right. Whenever I try something like that it looks like crap.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Made the greenish slime coming out of the pipe a little bit bolder/evident
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-embedded the sewage pipe on the right in a bit of circumfering purple to make it melt a bit better into the far background.
I love it! I'm definitely going to use that!
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Added some regrettably sloppy highlights to anything "metal" - the grate and the pipe. You get the idea - shiny objects, higher contrast, sharper/bolder boundaries between levels of light.
I see where you are going with this; I will try to work something like that in there.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
-Added gradiented attributes to the "deep" solid foreground, above and below. It is both hue shifted and darkened.
Oooh, I see it! Yeah, that's a great subtle effect! I've seen some SNES titles create this effect by changing the palette per scanline, so it doesn't actually increase the the palette the tiles are using. But I think what I'll do is incorporate that effect into the lighting layer I mentioned above, that will give me a little more control over how it looks.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
What i'm still missing is some detailing that tells the player something about this place. Who built this tunnel? What for? What is their culture? How was it used?
I'm hoping that would be more evident in the final game itself, but I will try to figure out what I can do to add to the "story" the environment tells. Good call.
FrankenGraphics wrote:
I might also want to even out the grainy-quality level detail between different textures so that they feel artisically more coherent. Some of them kind of come across as scaled photo-graphics unless worked with. I'd might even consider removing a colour or two out of the grainy detail. But you can go a long way just by balancing shadows and highlights.
Could you do me a favor and point out exactly which tiles you think conflict artistically? I used some new tricks and methods for creating some of these tiles, and if this is something you are noticing I want to make sure that it isn't just these methods that are changing things.