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[irishcream]

You need moar shading!

I see you have a little (very little) bit of shading but you're being way to bashful.Remember that as an artist light and shadow is one of your biggest tools - think about the shape of the subject and the light source and lay on some shadows (and highlights) and don't be shy about it!

Some basic tips on shading and lighlights:

• As the color appoaches a highlight - it will desaturate (if the light source is white) otherwise it will hue shift and desaturate.
• Unless your midtone is fullly saturated, when you shade you will saturate the color as well as decrease the value
• Keep in mind that light cools down (ie, goes to blue/green) - if you do any water color painting a common way to do shading is to add French Ultramarine Blue (which is a dark blue) to do the shading, this not only saturates and devalues but it shifts it towards blue
• when doing night - it's not just black - keep in mind that the light from the moon will create a blue glow - that's a very cool light that's reflected from the sun off the moon

Hope this helps!

[Sean Raia]

Ok.
Last night I worked a little on making the house look more consistent with the other sprites.
Additionally, lighting was tuned to be more fancy and less fast so to speak, still no colored lights although I have experimented with some variations that looked not-so-great.

Those ugly light posts have been changed to tiki torches. I feel like they fit the "natural" environment more.

Here's a full scale image with as much blur as you see in-game. Its drawing a resolution of 480x320 up to full screen.



I would like to simply double my screen size and remain in windowed, however when I do that certain tiles leak their boundary lines, Its rather hard to explain. Is there a known fix for this?

Edit IrishCream, I just saw your post and Im quite glad you think so to be honest. I was only sparingly shading because I felt like too much would look bad. I'l try working over the background a bit tonight.

[Kevin]

I would like to simply double my screen size and remain in windowed, however when I do that certain tiles leak their boundary lines, Its rather hard to explain. Is there a known fix for this?

Chevy's scaling code that I mentioned earlier solves exactly this. In my experience, Game Maker doesn't handle scaling well on its own and, as far as I know, there's no "official" fix for it.

[irishcream]

Edit IrishCream, I just saw your post and Im quite glad you think so to be honest. I was only sparingly shading because I felt like too much would look bad. I'l try working over the background a bit tonight.

Sean - I also want to mention that there is some significant problems with how you're handling the lighting. I'm hope I'm not coming across as sounding mean - just trying to give some helpful feedback =)

• The light source is clearly colored - it's a flame but the lighting effect is void of color
• There's some serious banding action going on.
• The colors in the dark regions desaturate.

Here's what I'd recommend. It's important to realize that light cools down. This is why fire is red/orange/yellow - it's because it's hot and powerful light. Moonlight is a pale blue because it's cool. For your lighting effect I'd try moving from yellow>blue


As per shading - maybe this is more a question of style but I feel like you have a little bit right now and it's just so nebulous - if it were me I'd go one way or the other - Either shade it or just go the other direction and try to create something artful with just shape and color. Just my opinion.

-Cheers.