WIP Ancient Keys DX

[Q-Nova]

Yeah, you're definitely right that it has a slight problem with color contrast. It's something I'll toy around with, but so far, no other color looks quite right to me. A darker gray would be lovely, but that's not something this NES palette affords me.

I decided to play around with the screenshot for a bit:



For the first image, I applied dithering to the background to make it look darker. It makes the bricks less pronounced, although it kinda looks a bit messy and I'm not sure if it will flicker when scrolling. For the second image, I took inspiration from a SMW castle background, where bricks are sporadically placed over a black void. It makes the background more varied, but from what I've experienced it seems tough to strike a balance between looking too cluttered and too sparse. You could even try mixing the two, maybe have some bricks be the original and others be darker (like in the SMW background I linked).

I don't know, I just wanted to share a few ideas that might help. When watching that preview video, the background as it is doesn't really look as bad, so maybe that will be the case when I get myself immersed in the game. I don't remember being bothered by the background in the original version of this game, although part of that could be younger age.

As a side note, what's that background in the fourth screenshot supposed to be? I always interpreted it as some sort of floral-pattern wallpaper, similar to what you'd see in Victorian-era homes, but I just wanted to be sure.

Quillax Ship - Where you can download all of my cool, keen mods and super-marvelous fangames!