How to get the old Sierra vibe

[Agnetha]

Hey guys! I'm working on my first AGS game and would love to know what you all think of my concept art.
I'm going for the old school SCI look but without the colour restrictions. I'm struggling with achieving that look I feel as I can't decide what should be clearly pixels and what should be more gradient. I'm also not sure what colour the main character should be as I'd like the game to take place in a green forest without her design fading into the background. All suggestions very much welcome! Sorry if the image doesn't work haven't tried this before.

https://imgur.com/a/pv5Sy7C

[brushfe]

Hello and congratulations on your first game!

If you're going for the SCI style, I'd vote for staying away from smooth gradients entirely and using pixels and dithering (as you have).

Working within the restrictions of the old technology will force your art to match the style of the day. If you're breaking that rule with a broader palette, sticking to pixels and dithering will be even more important.

For the main character, I think you're right to stick to reds and whites - the forest will be greens and blacks mostly, with blue for water and sky, so that's a good balance. King's Quest IV has a similar setting and took the same approach,which could be good reference.

Hope that helps! Keep sharing your progress!

[Agnetha]

Thank you so much! <3

[Danvzare]

By old school SCI style without the colour limitations, I assume you mean SCI 1.0 (the EGA version), which felt more like the old AGI games but at 320x200 instead of 160x200. Because to get the SCI 2.0 style, I'd highly recommend using watercolours (or an equivalent brush in Photoshop) to paint your backgrounds.

But assuming you mean the EGA SCI games but with an unbound colour palette, I think brushfe has given some good advice.

My advice would be to try and draw with the EGA palette, and then convert it to full colour. You'll probably find that with the initial limitations, you'll be forced to rely more on certain colours for shading and separating details. For example, your character is wearing a dress of varying shades of red. This would be impossible to illustrate in EGA, so they would've probably made the sleeves white. These choices born from limitation, in turn helped create the style that you're thinking of.

Another thing to remember about the early SCI games, is that much like the AGI games, the backgrounds were more or less stored in a way not unlike vector art. So try and keep that in mind when drawing your backgrounds. That means nice smooth blobs with few to no 90 degree angles. The left side of the dithered wave juts out a bit, and the left side of the top dithered grass patch, also juts out a bit. Those parts should probably be smoother. Unless the jutting out is an important detail that was included.

Overall though, I think what you've got is already pretty good. Like brushfe said, you should stay away from smooth gradients, so dither that sky. But I also think you might've gone a little overboard with the dithering on the grass. Then again, early SCI games did have a lot of checkerboard dithering.

[ThreeOhFour]

Cool stuff!   I agree with folks that gradients are probably best avoided here, and had some other suggestions that are easiest to show in an edit:



-Some of the colour contrast could use a little tweaking. The brightest green of the grass is quite bright, meanwhile the contrast between her skin and the lightest pink of her top is very hard to differentiate between.

-Rather than having clear zones of earth/grass, it's nice to break up the transition zones with sketchy areas. This works a bit like dithering but feels a bit more natural and is a bit like how painters work.

-Rather than individual flowers uniformly spaced around the scenery, the Sierra artists would do grouped clusters. This feels a bit more natural, is a bit more like how painters & illustrators work, and helps both composition and give a sense of perspective to the terrain.

-Replaced the gradient sky with simple flat colour and simple 2 colour clouds. No effort spent here, I just used a big round brush with the darker cloud colour, and then repeated the process over top with the lighter cloud colour.

[Agnetha]

ThreeOhFour OMG! this looks so good! Thank you for the advice <3