Twin Crowns [GxB, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance]

[Sharm]

Here's the colored background! It still needs some effects like water in the fountain and reflection on the floor, but I figured I'd put it up in case someone had ideas on how to improve it.

[chocojax]

I really like the colors, especially the gold, since it looks like aged-gold(but not ancient-old) I think, lool. Though, I think that the blue is a little bit too saturated compared to the gold/red scheme. It's also very blatant that you used a 3D program to create this, so you could try to filter it to make it look more in-tune with your sprites, or color the thing yourself. x:
Like, if you were to put up the sprite in mockup1.png onto this, it would look a little bit out of place. Though the sprite in that seems to be a WIP, so it all depends on how you're planning to color. Just my thoughts, though.

[Sharm]

Oh, I do not want it to be obvious that it was made with a 3d program. I guess I'll take out the layer with the 3d generated shadows, draw shadows of my own, take out the cg plants while I'm at it and hand draw new ones, make the blue more gray, maybe duplicate the layer with the lines to make them more obvious. Is the textured coloring working? I can't decide if I like it or not.

It's funny that you said it had a red/gold scheme. The only red in the image is on the lamps.

[chocojax]

Oh no, I meant the maroon-type reds on the pots/doors/etc, lool.
Well, I think the cg plants are fine, but it's fine if you hand-draw them too. :v
Well, I just noticed the marble-like textures now because of how light they were, haha. I think they're fine, as long as you add in stronger shading to make it more interesting overall(though try not to make it more interesting than the sprites themselves). The textures on the blue at the bottom are a little bit strange though.

[Sharm]

Getting that background to look like it matches the sprite is proving to be very hard. Right now it looks much too interesting and is distracting. I'll keep working on it, once I figure it out it should be easier to make more backgrounds. I'm hoping anyway!

Been working on the gui. Here's a mockup of the title screen, with the new button showing off the rollover. The font will probably change and I'm hoping to get some feedback before I start attempting to code it. I'm not sure if it looks nice or not, it's got a very warm color scheme (which works for the story) but I'm extremely partial to cool schemes.

[Arowana]

The concept sounds really cute and I like the idea of choices affecting the MC's personality. Will you be keeping track of hidden "personality stats" that determine which scenes you see, or perhaps what future choices are available to you?

Regarding the title screen, I think the warm color scheme works well with the logo, as well as the presumably lighter tone of the story. Really like the pretty golden border as well. I think I might center the logo on the left hand side a bit more (unless you are planning to put a picture below it?). I might also prefer non-transparent arrows and slightly bigger font/smaller arrows (just because, right now, the arrow size seems large compared to the font size). But yeah, I really like it overall.

[Sharm]

The concept sounds really cute and I like the idea of choices affecting the MC's personality. Will you be keeping track of hidden "personality stats" that determine which scenes you see, or perhaps what future choices are available to you?

Yes, you'll get different scenes, dialogue and conversational options depending on what you pick. That is, if I can make a script that lives up to what I want to do. I've played a few Otome games where on the first play through I was still getting to know the characters and trying to decide between them, by the time I picked a guy I had lost my ability to get an ending with them. I wanted to make a game where the choice between guys was obvious and simple, but where you could make other choices and enjoy yourself before that big choice and this seemed like the best way to do it.

Regarding the title screen, I think the warm color scheme works well with the logo, as well as the presumably lighter tone of the story. Really like the pretty golden border as well. I think I might center the logo on the left hand side a bit more (unless you are planning to put a picture below it?). I might also prefer non-transparent arrows and slightly bigger font/smaller arrows (just because, right now, the arrow size seems large compared to the font size). But yeah, I really like it overall.

Putting the logo anywhere else looked wrong, I think it's going to need a vignette below it to make the whole thing work. Hmm, I bet I could make it cycle through some nice pictures. . . . No, no, must stop the feature bloat before it starts! I'll have to think about what picture would work there. It'll probably just be the castle and surrounding city. You're right, the arrows are taking all the attention away from the words. Hmm, maybe if I make the text big enough to overlap the edge of the arrows it would balance out. I'll have to think about making it not transparent, though I agree that the way I did it isn't quite working.

Thanks for all the positive words! Switching to a new OS and realizing than none of my programs work has really killed my productivity so it's been a little hard to stay motivated or feel like I'm moving forward at all. I figured if I could make the art for the GUI I could start figuring out how to code it and still do some work while on this computer. One way or another I should have my old OS back in a week or two and can get back to my old habits. 'Course by then I'll be moving. . . .

[Sharm]

I haven't tested it with a sprite yet, but I think this may be done.

[Auro-Cyanide]

Are you going to add lighting? I think once you do it will make it really shine. The 3D model itself is amazing though, lots of detail. Good work!

[Sharm]

How did you make it look so awesome?! Especially the water fountain, it just looks a lot better. I did try to add a little bit of lighting but obviously I did not go far enough. BTW, your background art is exactly the style I've longed to be able to create myself, I'm very flattered that you like anything about mine. The model did take a really long time and lots of patience to get like that, but I'm a pixel artist, I'm used to that kind of thing. Sometimes it's relaxing to do something both artistic and repetitive at the same time.

[Auro-Cyanide]

I wish I could do 3D stuff, but I pretty much suck at it. I can't even move around the areas properly XD 3D space just seems to confuse me.

It's not that much. I use photoshop so it's just a bunch of 'light' layers and adjustments. I use some gradients set to overlay with a lowish opacity to help unify the colours (I used purple and orange here). I used a big soft brush to paint light coming through the windows and I tend to use overlay and/or softlight/screen. I paint some bluish shadows in the darker areas and set to multiple on a low opacity. With the water fountain, water isn't actually blue so I made it more pale and had the light shine through it. I also painted in some small details to the water with a hard edges brush in white. And then I finish up with adjustment layers like Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Levels etc. It's a really good idea to start off with the base like what you have, but if you do the lighting on seperate layers you can change it for different times of the day

[Sharm]

I don't think I'm good at 3D, though I can see why it looks like I am from this image. All the patterns in Arabic architecture seem to be based around combining circles and squares in interesting ways, if I had to do something more European I'd be lost. In reality I'm just stubborn and all my perspective drawings are horrible. I started learning how to use sketchup when I realized it was either that or become good at drawing buildings the old fashioned way. Since I've been trying to make perspective work for me almost as long as I've been drawing, learning sketchup seemed easier and faster. I had some real problems learning how to navigate when I first started, so I feel your pain.

Sounds like this lighting step is going to be just as complicated as every other step in this process. Thanks for going through all that trouble to edit, I'll be sure to study it carefully as I try to replicate the results. It might be kind of fun to try and replicate all the different times of day with just lighting.

EDIT: This isn't as dramatic as Auro-Cyanide's but I think it looks very nice!

[WickedRaccoon]

gotta say,i looooove your art!!!!count me as a stalker of this thread (^_^)

[Boomsickle]

I love that BG it looks so perfect :3

[Sharm]

Thanks to both of you! I keep looking at the background and forgetting that I really did do it myself. I really hope all of them end up looking as good, it just seems like such a fluke! I wish I had more to show, but I think it'll be all writing for a while.