May be a little difficult to distinguise the player's characters, enemies, bonuses etc from the background. May require some highlighting of different objects.
I totally adore the style and design When it comes to "readability" of your scene: It's always a good idea to change it into grayscale - you will notice that a lot of your elements have very similar values (grayscale differences) which makes it confusing for the eye to make out shapes and distinguish important from less important objects in color. If that makes any sense. If you work a bit more in contrast and values between your characters, elements and background it would help with the overall readability.
Nice scene. Like others have mentioned though, I'm not sure if the characters match the scene well. The background has softer lines and more pastel colors, while the characters have harder and sharper lines.
Interesting thing you have going here. Just a few comments based on my own experience. I had this exact same problem a few months back and someone helped me out. So my turn to pass it around . 1. Like Kyena said earlier, definitely work on the values. Remember that when you're working on such scenes, you should always move from darker value to lighter value. So your FG (Foreground) should have the darkest values, the MG (Midground) should have medium values and your BG should have the lightest values. When I say dark to light, I'm referring to relative values rather than absolute values. It's not a "rule", but if you're not sure how to break this rule, then it's a good rule to follow . 2. Use Depth of Field on your BG and FG elements. It'll immediately make a perceivable difference. 3. Try to reduce the number of colors you use. You pretty much have the entire color palette in that screenshot - yellow, green, blue, red, violet, brown - they're all there . 4. Ideally, try not to have attention grabbing elements in your BG. I personally would avoid using red in the BG and FG simply because they tend to attract too much attention, while you want the player to be looking in the MG. Just a quick mock up to show you what I mean. See how the focus immediately comes to the characters? Sorry that it's a bad mockup - we're one week away from launching our game and I hardly have any extra time. Anyway, hope it helps!
Something like this maybe ? More blury background, the heroes more front and more saturation and contrast in the general layout ? Yours is too bright for my taste.
Sure, that's true stamasar. I think I was trying to show the 'dark to light as you recede' concept, rather than hand over the exact values. In fact, if I were doing this, I would probably make the values and saturation reduce in multiple layers to give that sense of depth.
Actually, the bg layout suggest some level of depth, in this case, adding a 'drop shadow' on your characters might not be a good idea, this made them look foreign, as if they don't belong in the game scene. I suggest removing the drop shadow and just drawing a simple one like: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-34139656/stock-vector-evil-cartoon-teddy-bear-character-and-shadow-in-separate-layers-for-easy-editing.html hope this help~
