Background Critique?

[Armageddon]

1x:

2x:

It's a police station hall. Trying to emulate gameboy's style I guess, I think i used to many colors and dirty dithering.

[cat]

Well, it looks traced and if it wasn't for the clean lines on this grid thing, I'd say it's a photo converted with a filter. I think gameboy traces a lot, so if this is what you want it to look like, you're going in the right direction. But as you said, there are too many colors.

[Pinback]

Dirty dithering be damned. I like it.

[CaptainD]

Well I'm no expert at all, but I also like it, and can't see how there are too many colours! 

But... the only thing that looks wrong to me is the stuff in the background, it looks like it's meant to be seen through glass?  To me the colours don't look quite right for that, it looks like you're looking through a hole rather than through glass.  Might just be me though!

Anyway, if I was playing a game and this background was in it, I'd be more than happy.

[Adder]

I think it looks really cool.  The thought occurred that maybe some reflections on the floor from the lights might look good? But it's not important - it looks great.

[Gribbler]

I don't know why but it reminds me of Operation Stealth airport location. Maybe it's colour palette. Anyway, it looks great.

[Chicky]

Certainly not too many colours! The roof tiles could be defined a little more, if you don't want solid lines try using a mid colour that is somewhere between the line colour and the base tile shade, to fill in the gaps.

You could do with a little anti-alias to smooth those diagonal lines where the floor meets the wall, take the wall colour and set the opacity to 50%, draw a pixel on the floor and use that colour to line the edges (avoiding double pixels). I would suggest using a dark brown for the edges of the window frames, always avoid using black (or near black) for shadows. I find it best to lay down the shape with mid tones first, leaving yourself plenty of room either way to add shadows/highlights.

Otherwise a very tidy background, keep it up!

[Andail]

When you say "too many colours", what do you mean exactly? Too many to pass for a gameboy game? Or too many to look good?

Depending on its purpose, I think it's looking really good. Of course, there is a certain stiffness to it, and it does come across as traced, but if the entire game has a style that matches this look, it's fine. Is this a 1st person adventure? One issue I foresee, otherwise, is that a non-antialiased character will have to scale a lot up and down to fit.

As for the composition, I'd probably either center it perfectly, or make it more definitely right/left oriented. Now it's slightly awry, which isn't harmonic.

[Armageddon]

Thank you guys so much for the feedback! This was more of a style test than a real background so I doubt I'll be fixing it up. But all of this will really help for future drawings. I thought it had too many colors because I just kept grabbing new ones for everything. There are 58 colors total and it felt sloppy. And it is pretty much a trace over, I'm not sure how I feel about that, but doing it this way would cause a lot of problems with placing characters as Andail said.

Operation Stealth airport was an influence, I tried to cut through the floor and ceiling tiles the way that game did, and use Amiga style techniques in general.

Thanks everyone!