Backburner Art #8- Leaf's Odyssey
Attempting some stuff with the background, shading, and blending.
This one had a bit of an experiment. Well, two, really. But I will talk about them when it comes up.
Leaf's Odyssey is a cool little Puzzle game that I wish I was better at. You play as Leaf, the ferret. There are a total of 6 enemy types in this game, of which only 3 are represented here.
The Flying Snakes are my least favorite to deal with in terms of puzzles. I can never predict them correctly, and unfortunately you need to do that for some puzzles. Here, I drew a group of them chasing Leaf and co. Bomb Bugs are more predictable, but also more dangerous. If you enter a square that surrounds them, they will prime, and will explode next turn. Obviously if that happened here, Leaf would die. Statues are inactive until they notice Leaf, after which they will head towards them, with an ability to move diagonally. If they die, they become rubble, which acts as a wall. Or, if they die in water, they become a stepping stone, because that's how that works.
First thing I experimented with is how to make things fade into the distance. I picked a color between the colors of the things that were next to each other in the background, then put that color gradient over the one that's overlaid on top. It's not as noticeable as I wanted it to be, but I think it helped bring the piece together. As for the other test, it was with shadows.
How I've been handling shadows (and shading in general) is thusly: The color of the light source (no matter what it was) gets its values sent to as white as it can be while still being its color, while the shadows that light will create will be the exact opposite color, being as close to black as it can be while still being its color. This time, I chose a sort of brown-ish color as the shadows. It's not even close to black, and honestly I don't remember what pushed me to use it, but I think it turned out well. It's similar with the light, which is similar to the color of the sky. It also isn't even close to white. It still worked out though.
My only regret was that the snakes don't actually look like they're floating off the ground.