Brellom

Game Dev - May 2025 #01 - New Level Art Direction

Added 2025-05-09 12:52:15 +0000 UTC

This week has been fairly quiet and uneventful (outside of that large batch of sketches posted recently), but I've been spending my time working on the tiles for the upcoming game demo. It's still a work-in-progress, but here's the direction I'm currently going for.

Rather than being an outdoors/ruined location with cool colours, this one features a lot of neutral colours - allowing some of the warmer tones to stand out a bit more. In some ways, I feel like I'm deviating a tiny bit from the simple colour schemes seen in NES CV, as well as relying less on light/shadow shapes. But if anything needs to be fixed, I can do it later. This should still hopefully provide a more unique set of visuals compared to previous demos.

I found it very difficult to balance readability, detail, and colour. I'm not using the same colours in the NES palette now, so I'm not being as limited - making it harder to solve problems.

One of the most notable features of this collection of sprites is actually hidden here - it's the "stretches" of shadow you can see running along the ceiling and floor - it's modular enough to be spread across the scene to have areas fade in/out of darkness.

I'd like to do a little bit more, perhaps for a basement or some such. I'd also like to go back to the previous tiles and update one or two - like making the dirt tiles less noisy.

Don't forget to eat & sleep.