Adventure Game Studio

Here's something I've been wondering.  Is there an easy way to alter artwork to coincide with changes in time and weather?  I've been spending a lot of time doing textures and hand-drawn gradients to line up with nighttime scenes.  But what about when it's daytime?  I really enjoy games that feature dynamic environments, but will including night-time and day-time backgrounds mean twice as much work?  Somehow I feel like if I just lower the darkness of the background using psp, it won't look quite right.  Are there strategies people employ to approach this problem, or is it just a matter of doing it the hard way?

-Logan

Putting  layer on top of the scene with your night time shades, then adjusting the opacity to fit seems like a place to start....

Don't you mean the other way around?  Like putting the shading layers above and then fixing the opacity?  Or does it not matter.  Probably doesn't.  I see what you mean.  I guess my other quandry is just general color theory...like when it's "darker" down my hallway my off-white walls are not necessarily just darker off-white...if there is a orangish lamp the walls will look dark orange.  So how to take all of these things into account when trying to shift a daytime image to a nighttime one.  Do you really just have to start from scratch and use different colors...

Well, I personally am no great artist... I like to consider myself the "best bad artist there is..." So this might be the worst advice ever given, but...

I normally draw a completely neutral, flat-shaded image... as though the room is being viewed on a cloudy day with no lights on. Then, I would draw seperate day and night scenes, rather than trying to draw one or the other and then turning it completely 180 degrees around.

I wouldn't say it's too much work. I think having both night and day versions would add a lot of appeal, if it fits. I would go with just a new shading layer and basically rethinking the light sources. So if you wanna make a day image into a night image, you can turn the light into a bluish hue and include less of it with a shading layer. If you wanna make a night image into a day image, you have to add color, and a highlight layer.

Coincidently, I've just finished all the day and night backgrounds for a game.
Turning a day scene into a night scene isn't hard work at all, since there is nothing new to draw. I just adjusted the brightness for every layer seperately, added lighting and used the airbrush for the glow from light sources.


Off course I'm a slacker, not a real artist.

Perhaps for a scene that is not too complicated one might be able to cram everything into one picture, and switch day/night only by swapping the pallete. In this case, you might even add a palette for dawn & dusk and interpolate smoothly between all fourÃ,  ;D

i use photoshop and i find that the best remedy to create a night version of a day picture is to add a new layer, flood fill the layer with a dark blue, put the layer's blending mode as multiply and that's it. you could probably do the same thing with the gimpy.