Colour scheme - too dark for ya?

[cat]

I was not beeing sarcastic - what I meant was, that now most of the gray areas are lit by imaginary lightsources. The small light below the door could not make so much light and would produce different shadows. On the other hand, the red and green lights should do more reflections.

So my suggestion is to either go in Anian's direction with making everything brighter or making everything that is not lit pitch black with more emphasis on the red and green lights (and maybe also the FoA gameplay that Babar has mentioned).

[StillInThe90s]

Ok, thanks for the feedback everyone. I don't really know where to go with this one. To me, the damn thing shines like the sun so I guess I should have my screen checked. I have been trying to turn up the light with little success. It either looks like Anians edit -flat and bright gray, or the brighter areas are vibrating all over the place.

@Snarky: Could you put [imgzoom] in the how-to thread?

As people have pointed out, when drawing a dark room you don't need to make every part so dark that people are squinting just to see anything: by keeping the parts of the image that are in shadow an undefined black (or off-black)...

I thought this was what I have been doing.

@dactylopus: The red things are supposed to be glowing buttons without any real light coming from them.

@Babar: Literal darkness was not the plan but simply pulling up light levels at this point, does not seem to work that well.

@Cat: I thought there was quite a lot of black in there. Most of the dark colour was put in to give it some subtle structure. It would be hard to do that with green and red, but I see what you mean.

[selmiak]

after turning the thing 180° i have to say the darkest dark is just right and such a nice subtle contrast that really fit the mood. at least on my screensettings

[StillInThe90s]

Thanks selmiak. It is comforting to know tha at least one person has the same settings as I do.
Maybe I should have people send me polaroids.

Btw, why 180°? (I do that sometimes as well but only to check composition, not colour.)

[Babar]

Sure. Here you go:


Sorry for the crappy phone camera quality, it doesn't really glow like that (in fact the entire image shows up brighter in the photograph than it does on my screen, for some reason ), but the visibility of black on it is basically like that. It was after I loaded your original image in photoshop and upped the contrast that I realised you had a secondary blue shade between the lines. You've got some awesome pixelling skills, it is a shame I can't really see any of them .

[StillInThe90s]

You are not for real, Babar.
I can see why you would have some difficulties reading this. It's a skeleton really.
On the other hand, both the brighter blue, the greens and the reds seem to come through pretty well, which means that you can see all essential hotspots (screens, lamps and that thing on the right, which is supposed to be a locker by the way). 
Would adding some kind of "bright colour" -mode be a good idea? Like a choice in the title screen or something.

[Babar]

As you say, I can see the important things here, and for for just playing the game, that is all that matters, I guess, although then I'd miss all your nice background art.

While simply from an accessibility standpoint, games where it is trivial to design a brightness slider should have one, and if possible a high contrast and colour-blind mode (or at least having a look at your BGs using one of the colourblindness tools available to make sure that specific important parts don't get hidden away), but the issue here isn't really a problem with my eyesight.
If the majority of players either can't see all your art without straining, or can't see most of it at all, and the rest say "it is fine" (i.e. they wouldn't mind it being brighter either), it'd probably better for you to attempt to fix up something in the basic artwork itself.
Of course, in the end, you're making the game for YOU, and what you consider important is the only thing that matters.

[StillInThe90s]

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42681740/snow_ship_b_contr%2Bb_bb.png[/imgzoom]
Sorry for not respoonding until now. I have been experimenting with the palette and come up with this as being the brightest scheme I can use without getting all of the issues I had with Anians edit.
It is however, still pretty dark. Probably too dark for babars screen. The default gamma slider will be in there though, so it should have some degree of flexibility.

Babar: Could I abuse your kindness and ask you to try out the gamma settings, if I sent you an .exe?

[Babar]

Sure, StillInThe90s. Go ahead.
And as for your latest attempt, yeah, it is still just the outlines (although slightly brighter outlines) that I can see.

Let me show you something:

On the left is the light intensity histogram for your first image. On the right is the one for your latest image. In the first one, you can see you had absolutely no colours in your image with a light intensity of over 128 (i.e. half the range), and probably 90% of your colours had a light intensity of less than 32.
In the latest one, you have 5 colours with light intensity greater than 128, although there is probably less than 1% of your entire image anywhere on the screen of that intensity, and still have probably over 75% of your colours with a light intensity of 16 or less.

As a counter example, to show you don't need literal darkness to show darkness in the game, and that if you up the overall brightness, you won't have an issue of unimportantly bright portions stealing the attention away from the important bits, here are two screens from the Monkey Island games. They are among the darkest in-game screens in those games that I could find:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/secret-of-monkey-island/screenshots/gameShotId,501385/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/monkey-island-2-lechucks-revenge/screenshots/gameShotId,501407/
The first one is fairly similar in colour layout to your screen, although it doesn't offer as much important detail. The second one is a more traditional background. After I removed the mobygames logos, inventory, white text and guybrush sprite, this is their brightnesses:


Finally, just to give you an example of what it looks like, regardless of screen setups, if I take your first image and pull the light levels so that the brightest pixel in that image is now 255 (which I admit might be a bit extreme, but the frequencies of the different levels is exactly the same, they've just been spread out over the whole range), this is what it looks like:
[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/G3vvVHF.gif[/imgzoom]
(allowing me once again the marvel at your incredible skill at pixelling )

[Anian]

Sorry for not respoonding until now. I have been experimenting with the palette and come up with this as being the brightest scheme I can use without getting all of the issues I had with Anians edit.
It is however, still pretty dark.

After Babar offered that nice explanation, I just want to point out my "edit" was actually just a quick Levels adjustment in Photoshop, nothing more. And the edit (mine or Babars) still looks better to me, not only from a perspective of visibility on various monitors and settings but from an artistic standpoint, when painting (digital or regular) you practically never use black for black surfaces and white for white surfaces (I'm not talking about details but large surfaces that depict light)...maybe in comics, but that's because inking plays a large part in the style and images usually need higher contrast because of the size of the panels.

When painting, every "color" has it's hue, saturation and brightness. Making things black or white makes the surface lose a part of it's color and thus a part of the image and perception is gone, plus when painting you work with contrast in hue as much as contrast between levels of brightness, for example if something is blue and an object next to it is yellow, the yellow object will look lit while the other would seem to be in shadow even if they're the same brightness. Just look at that link Babar put http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/secret-of-monkey-island/screenshots/gameShotId,501385/ - the yellow of the lights from the villages are basically as bright as the blue of the forest, but you still perceive something as a light source and something as a reflection or lack of light.

I suggest choosing a palette for your image (pick a few shades (brightness and saturation levels) of green, red and dark blue) and try recreating a scene with that limited palette. See how you like it like that. Your newest edit is really quite a step in the right direction.

[StillInThe90s]

Thanks guys. You are very kind.
I do realize what the problem is here, but not how to fix it without reworking everything from scratch. The level-tweaked version in babars post looks (yet again) ok in 1x and maybe 2x zoom but is not really readable in any larger format. The art is simply not good enough to do that. It might get a little better if I reworked the floor and ceiling and added another colour to soften things up, but I'm skeptical.
However, I partially disagree with both of you about literal darkness (well, not entirely). The screens from monkey island are both moon lit outdoor scenes, especially the graveyard, which makes a comparison difficult. This is an indoor scene which is what I am attempting. -Literal black everywhere. Ok, my scene is not aiming for this cartoony look at all but without a dark base, everything goes very gray for me.

@Anian: I knew your level-tweak was not a proper edit, but I didn't know what else to call it. 

[Babar]

But the edit I did didn't remove the black base. It is still there! It shouldn't appear washed out or grey, because it is not. My image contains the exact same number of unique colours as your original did, I've just spread them out over the entire range, but the black is still at black. I suppose there can be some leeway in using a black base (since the black doesn't so much represent any specific surface, as it does the basic canvas). But even in the image you linked, light levels were picked from the entire range, although it is a bit unfair to you to compare to that, as it is an EGA shot.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/fmtowns/secret-of-monkey-island/screenshots/gameShotId,501381/
This one of the same location also shows how despite it representing dark, everything is clearly visible and has levels covering the entire range (it actually has higher brightness levels than the graveyard one ).

[StillInThe90s]

But the edit I did didn't remove the black base. It is still there! It shouldn't appear washed out or grey, because it is not.

No, no, I was talking about my own failed attempts looking gray. Not yours.

About House of Mojo: My initial ambition was to keep colour count fairly low. If I want to use colours with the same brightness levels as that screenshot, then I would have to go for a more cartoony (EGA monkey island) style. I'm counting 88 colours in that shot, 18 in the blue area around the kettle alone. My piece is currently using (and struggling with) 10 colours in all.

One of the problems I'm having with brighter colours and higher contrast is consistency with the rest of the game. I already made a couple of semi-dark outdoor scenes with ridiculously low contrast (unfortunately), and wanted to make this indoor one look darker and more claustrophobic. It seems that every edit I do takes it further away from that mood. Maybe EGA is not such a bad idea after all.
Anyway. New attempt with a brighter floor/ceiling/detail -colour:
(You will have to take my word for it if you can't see it.)   
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42681740/snow_ship_b_contr%2Bb_bc.png[/imgzoom]

[Babar]

I can!

I am really sorry for all this haranguing, it's just that I really like your pixel art (when I can see it ). I'm not suggesting that you use EGA colours, I just said it was kind of unfair towards you to compare your piece to the voodoo lady's house background that you linked, because that was using the EGA palette, and I'm not suggesting that you should switch over to the EGA palette.

I also do not suggest you use a grey base, and I don't think anyone else was either. That would obviously look bad. The idea was simply to stay away from pure black and pure white. In your case, perhaps a dark blue would worked, which I think is what you used.

Also, as far as I understand, cat's point about the bright highlights you were using (on the floor, for example), was that while it is helpful (in terms of visibility and making out the shapes in the dark background), that isn't how light works, and if you had the image not be so dark, you wouldn't have to compromise on that.

[StillInThe90s]

Don't apologize for helping out. I was the one who asked for help in the first place.
Actually, I was seriously thinking of going EGA. I mean, having graphics that people can't see, feels a bit pointless.
Going with Cat's suggestions would basically mean reworking the whole thing from null, so I am not doing that no matter how good the points are. Besides, this tread is not about improving composition, but rather making the damn thing visible. (Of course, I will take the things pointed out with me to improve other work, further on. So thanks people!)
The monkey island background thing I was going on about was just to illustrate that a high contrast needs some sort of gradients to not look like tv-static, at least on my screen. -I hope that grammar made sense.

But back to the main issue: Was there any improvement at all in the last version? (there was one brighter tone added to all essential bits.)

[dactylopus]

I can see a definite improvement with the newest version.  It seems brighter without sacrificing the dark feel you were going for.

[Armageddon]

I think it's a little too bright now, you don't get that scary feeling of what's in the shadows, maybe add another color that's darker blue around the edges of the room.

[StillInThe90s]

Thank you folks.
It seems that this is as dark as it gets without turning invisible for some people.

I think it's a little too bright now, you don't get that scary feeling of what's in the shadows, maybe add another color that's darker blue around the edges of the room.

I don't quite follow you there. Darker blue? The darkest colour has an RGB value of 2,6,9 right now. Could you please clarify...