Lemma Soft Forums

If you've followed anything we've done, you might know we've been slowly developing a color style, and we've finally got it all figured out and have begun heavy spriting. Here's a little teaser of one of our main characters, Harada Riku.

It's nice, but is the shirt supossed to be brighter in the second one? Regardless, the style's cool. :3

xD We're having an in-house debate about which color is better. Half of us like the brighter shirt, the other half likes the duller shirt.

I like the brighter one. Art looks great guys.

The brighter shirt looks a bit too contrasty, to me, if it's supposed to all be the same colour. It looks like a mid-grey-blue shirt that's been spray-painted cyan around the collar. I think I'd personally prefer it if the duller one was just given a little more depth of colour.

I'd also note that while the rendering is quite nice, there are some odd lighting inconsistencies. For example, the chin and the underside of the top's collar look like they're lit from directly above, while the arm on the left looks like it's lit from down-and-left, and the arm on the right looks like it's lit from down-and-right. The belts hanging from his waist cast shadows as if they're lit from directly in front of him, perhaps a little down.

It is actually not supposed to be all the same color, more like a color gradient effect as far as clothing style.

As far as lighting, it actually looks to me like he's standing in a fairly light heavy environment (where there's light coming from numerous sources) and shadows are being cast by his clothing, so I'm gonna disagree as far as that. xD

I like the second one better. They are both really good, but the second one is much more vibrant.

I prefer the first, as the bright colors of the second are a little distracting. My eye is drawn to the shirt rather than the face.

kinougames wrote: As far as lighting, it actually looks to me like he's standing in a fairly light heavy environment (where there's light coming from numerous sources) and shadows are being cast by his clothing, so I'm gonna disagree as far as that. xD

And this explains the discontinuity between - say - the sleeve on the right and the pocket his hand is shoved into? On the sleeve, the bottom side is lit and the top side in shadow; on the pocket, the complete opposite. A 'fairly light-heavy environment' shouldn't cast such heavy shadows on the arms or pockets at all if it's going to allow for all the lit areas to be lit.

Don't get distracted by the rendering. It's nice, but it's inconsistent and looks kind of weird.

(Of course, most of your buyers will get distracted by the rendering, because most people don't even notice hideous anatomy problems when the colouring's half-decent, so you probably won't lose much by ignoring me if you just don't want to fix it and will undoubtedly still have people fawning over your art... but it's something you and/or the rest of your team should bear in mind when doing further graphics, especially CG scenes where it's more important that everything's cohesive.)

I think you should pick one that will fit in the best with the rest of your game. If your game is mostly muted, then the first one would be best but if your game is all-in-all vibrant and colorful - then choose the second one.

For example, here's a game that have muted colors from the artwork to in-game images: And here is a game that have colors that pop: What will your game look in the final edition? What look/mood are you going for?
If you can answer that, then I think you'll find your answer. C:

Honestly, I'm staring at the picture repeatedly, trying to sort of see what you're looking at, and while I see errors (though there's actually another anatomical one that hits me much faster than the color issues xD), I think that it's absolutely true that they'll go unnoticed, especially as the sprites shift about the screen, vanish and reappear. As long as all the sprites are consistent, even in their errors, my goal was definitely to make sure the quality was high enough to fuzz out errors in the average buyer's mind.

For CGs, I'll certainly make sure that it's more carefully done.

@Rioka

One of the problems we had with deciding on a palette had to do with the range of colors we needed. While most of the characters have "normal" or easily mute-able hair colors, one character has very highly saturated red hair. We did a lot of testing with different reds, but most of them came out fairly ehhhh as far as the character design was concerned. So, we ended up with something that kind of has a range into the bright colors, and a range into the dark colors. At any rate, for now, we've sort of decided to stick this character into backgrounds with both and see what happens.

I love the style
The brightest style goes better with fantasy stuff, the other one goes better with a modern setting, I guess the game's atmosphere should decide his shirt color after all

But what about a modern fantasy setting? xD

Well, there are still variations XD, I wouldn't expect a similar look from a dramatic story and a comedy