Background and two Sprites

[ManicMatt]

Alright, I drew this background and two angles of my main character, to get a feel for what my style will look like before I design the whole game. My character will have 8 direction angles, this is forward and down right.

I've provided two images, one without any sprites (Oh I plan on adding a person feeding pigeons on the bench, and the clouds are going to gently drift across the screen if I can recall how to do that in AGS or find out how on the forums. it's been a while..) ..and one with both to see them in their environment.

So feel free to crit both background and/or sprites before I do more backgrounds and sprite angles/animation. I work with layers on both background and sprites, something I never did in my previous two games.

[ManicMatt]

Oops! I need to change his shoe colour, i changed it

[Ibispi]

I like your crisp detailed style of drawing, it looks good to me overall.

Something people do is they make it so the color saturation or the art style of backgrounds and characters differs so that you can more easily notice the characters on the screen, so maybe you could do something like that, or maybe add an outline to the character, I don't know.

Nice work tho.

[ManicMatt]

Thanks! My graphics have certainly improved over the years.

I deliberately went for no outlines, but he is very grey with his hair and clothes, so I'll make a conscious effort to not have lots of grey in the background like this image has.

[Cassiebsg]

Nice BGs and character.

A few things do stand out to me.

- One is the bright color. They seem way too much considering the rest of the art. Consider toning down the saturation on those bright greens (just use a "sprinkle" on the top of the tree to highlight the sun) and specially the blue sounds tie (that looks like it's trying to be the main character ).

- The diagonal view is somewhat inconsistent with the front view. On the front view I notice that his right hand is smaller than his left. Just copy & mirror the left one to the right and it'll be perfect. But it's the diagonal view that stands out more. His head is not straight but it's leaning on his left shoulder, and I would rotate his left foot a bit more parallel to the floor (making the feet stand slightly at n L or T shape). The current way it's drawn seems off to me.

- Last is a detail you haven't added yet and may well be in your plans to... but I'll just mention it... add a shadow to the character! Unless it's very low res, not having shadows always makes it feel to me that the characters aren't actually in that BG (or are floating or something).

[Priabudiman]

Overall its really great work!

couple things for me, the neon looking tree colors, and in my opinion you want to adjust the sky gradient and color to make it more softer.

[ManicMatt]

Okay!
- Toned down the green in the tree, the blue in his tie and also the park sign green. (Oh shoot, I didn't change update his forward sprite here. In the seperate sprite file his tie matches the saturation of his right-down view)
- Changed his face angle, but using previous head tilt as an idle animation, which will look something like this gif:

- Desaturated my sky a little. Imported my sky into GIMP (I use Asesprite) and used the blend tool.
- Tried shadows, but a realistic shadow will cause problems, and a little shadow didn't look good. At least my attempts didn't. I also looked at games like Discworld 2, Broken Sword, Deponia.. none have shadows, so I guess it's not a big deal. I agree would look better with proper shadows, but then he'd say, stand next to a wall and his shadow won't change shape.
- His hands are exactly the same size because I DID copy and flip them. Must be an optical illusion!

Thanks everyone! I think my story will take us places where there are no trees nearby haha!

[ThreeOhFour]

Looks cool! The first thing that caught my eye, though, was the horizontal part of the lamp post is really, uncomfortably close to the horizontal line that marks the top of the wall. This is referred to as a "tangent" in art. Putting some more sky between these two horizontal lines would really give the lamp post some more negative space, and help it to stand out much better.

[dactylopus]

The tree is the only thing I have issue with.  It's just a bit too bright still.

Overall, though, it looks very nice.

[ManicMatt]

Thanks! I've lowered the height of the lamp post (and naturally the shadow too) and dimmed the tree a lot more.

[dactylopus]

That tree looks much more natural.  Well done.

[eri0o]

I think it's Trails and Traces: The Tomb of Thomas Tew