my 1st bckground opinions and suggestions

[Mage]

I have just created my first background for a game i'm making and i want to know your opinion on this one and suggestions how to improve it (it was supposed to be monkey island 1 style) the most crappy things in my opinion are the moon, tree and the ground
soo... here it is :
http://republika.pl/mejdz/mage.jpg

[Nacho]

AWESOME... I don´t like the sky and the moon, as you said, but I´ll tell how to do them tomorrow... I must go to the bed, here in my country is fuckign late. Be sure to check my edit, you´ve got future!!!


SKYTUTORIAL

Well... we make a layer with the sky, and we paint it in black... (Rolling stones, yeah!)

1)We add random noise to this layer... we convert it into two colours, getting that the lighter spots become white, and the sky black. Using the constrast and brightness tool can help if we loss ALL the stars during the converssion



2)We floodfill the transparent space, which has become white, with black.

We use the filters to get the white spots become blue.

We can repeat the process one or two times, to get differnent tones of blue stars layers.

3)We paste the stars layers and we add some big and spectacular ones randomly. Remember that black has to be the transparent colour.


We GOT IT!!!

[jannar85]

Hey, this is pretty cool. Reminds me of Melee in Monkey Island...

[densming]

Great background!  I think you achieved your goal to make it in the MI style.  The shadows in the moon make it look like it's concave, instead of convex (i.e., it appears to bulge inward instead of outward).  If you could reverse this, and maybe add crater shadows, I think it would look much better.

[n3tgraph]

wow farlander, your edit really rox!!
nice t00tor

[Mage]

yeah those stars are much better... thx.
yeah... the moon looks like some kind of ugly button... i must correct it.
i still think the tree on the right looks kinnda crappy... anyone got any ideas ?

[Nacho]

I see nothing bad with the tree...  

[Mage]

Farlander : hmm.. maybe it's just me or the light reflection on the left is a bit to wide. i've been playing with your sky tutorial and i'm just wondering if you blurred the stars somehow or are they a flat colour (the jpg seems to be blurring everything)
Edit : oh.. and how did you drew those larger stars ? i'm trying but yours look muuuch better.

[Nacho]

My advise is not to take a lot of time for the screens, we´re not professionals, and, whereas our autocritic concept is big, the users of the game won´t see anything bad with the painting in most of the ocassions.

What I do is to put a time limit per screen, let´s say a week, which is a lot (Implies a year of working for a medium game), and I don´t go any further if I can´t get what I want. That´s a way for not stucking the games production.

here are some stars you can randomly add...



There´s no secret in the stars... It is just a little of work, but they will work for all the screens with skies in the game.

There must be two tones of blue for the stars I did... If not, it is a matter of the "JPGation"

[LordHart]

I just did a quick edit to the moon, because it kinda looked like some giant lolly thingy in the sky. I couldn't quite get the dark side of it the way I wanted but here it is...

Plus, I don't think it completely suits this style of drawing.

[Mage]

ok... i've redone the stars made a reflection in the water for them and drew a new moon... how is it now ?

[MrColossal]

looks MUCH better now rock on

now i can actually see stuff when before it was really dark

the only things that i would personally take out are the stars that are too close to the tree branches. like on the left and middle, there's one that looks like it's sitting on the tree branch in the middle and on the left there are two, one on the top left and one near the tip

know what i mean? otherwise woop, it's awesome

[Darth Mandarb]

This is a great example of the Critics Lounge working!

Excellent job on the image Mage!

Awesome mini-tut Farlander!

[TheYak]

Mage, excellent work.  I go with Farlander there, the tree is perfectly alright.  I actually preferred the overall look of your 1st moon better (softglow, more implied shadowing) but it did have an implied concavity to it and the new one works quite well also.  By the way, lovely use of a gradient for the sky, you don't even notice it unless you look for it (which is how gradients are supposed to be done, IMO).  

I love the image and thing the night-tones are great but having a little problem with the castle in the background.  It's not something I'd notice immediately and as a major feature of the background (I assume) it seems as though you might want it to stand out a touch more.  Difficult to do, without making it not match the rest of the scene.  Maybe a bit of the blue moonlight on the towers?  Or, maybe I'm being nitpicky.  You could very well leave it alone at this point and have at least 1 awesome background done.

[Gregjazz]

The stars make it look just like MI1, or kinda like Loom, also.

Awesome work!