Update 6 (27.07.2014) - Colors... those wonderful, beautiful colorsThe daily routine of travelling and these long hot summer days have been quite exhausting and because of that I have neglected my diary for more than a month by now. We've actually covered a lot of ground and I finally feel that both my mind and body are starting to get accustomed to the strain of the road and I've begun to write down my thoughts once again.
I stayed up pretty late last night. Well, to be honest, I have stayed up late almost every night. Maybe it's the heat or the anxiety of the road, but I often find it hard to fall asleep. I don't really mind though, since it allows me to mull over important matters and plan ahead for the coming days. But as I said, I stayed up late last night and was awestruck by the spectacular ehcilcian sunset.
There's something truly magical about the way how the setting sun unceasingly invades the lush green with faint shades and soft hues as the flames of the campfire make the shadows dance on the tree trunks and wild eyes glow in the nearing darkness of the forest. I wish I could share this bewitching sight, but I'm afraid that plain words and rough sketches can't even deliver the half of it.
This calm and soothing dusk has become one of my favorite parts of the day. It's a time when I can just relax alone in the midst of my own thoughts and absorb in everything around me - all the shapes and sounds and colors of Ehcilc.

For some reason, I'm usually not really bothered by many common drawing “mistakes” like weird anatomy or slightly off perspectives, but when things on my screen start to look eye-hurtingly saturated and bright, I get a little worried.
In order to maintain a consistent look and make things easier to manage, I decided to keep the colors scheme of the game relatively clean and simple. This means that there's no massive anti-aliasing or dithering, complex shading or shadows. Most backgrounds use around 50-100 colors and characters usually require 10-20. Even with (or maybe because of) such a low color count, finding the right colors can be rather troublesome, but after a lot of mixing and matching and testing, I usually get the stuff on my screen looking the way I want it to look. Sadly, this does not mean that it's done, on the contrary, this is where things get frustrating, because the colors look right only on MY laptop screen.
The dusty small screen of my trusty old Lenovo isn't really meant for any serious artistic endeavours and that's why I wanted to see how the screenshots look on a bigger screen before I posted the announcement topic in the AGS forums. And while everything looked neat and pleasant on my side, it was far from intended on a real monitor. Some of the colors looked way too bright and almost none were what they were supposed to be.
Comparison of colors:
So far, I've had a chance to look at Ehcilc from four different laptop and two different desktop computers. It's not really enough to make any substantial conclusions, but there seems to be a pattern emerging. My original color scheme looks fine on all laptop screens, but a bit too saturated and vivid on bigger LCD monitors, at least for my eyes. I solved the issue by decreasing saturation and brightness until everything looked more or less acceptable on all screens, but I'm probably going to have to tweak it some more before the final release.
All this led to adding a brightness/gamma slider to the game and I'm thinking of including other options that would allow the players to adjust the look of the game to a certain degree. Also, I'm guessing that I should find some time to create a proper color palette that I could use across all backgrounds and perhaps even invest in a quality monitor some time in the future.
Thank you for reading and please don't be shy to post comments, argue or ask questions.