Look very nice. It would be a Metroidvania game?
Also I prefer and overloaded place than an empty one.
Some of the areas are designed in a Metroidvania style, but the game is more in line with something like Diablo or Monster Hunter - The player accepts quests in the hub area, and then selects areas to travel to.
Some are designed quite open to be explorable, others play more like a traditional linear dungeon like the ones you'd find in WoW or Skyrim. There are also certain areas designed for specifc quests, one example is a road through a forest on which the player escorts a merchant caravan.
I'm attempting to give options for progression, some players might like the linear dungeons more while others love exploring :)
In terms of combat and gameplay it's still heavily leaning on the Metroidvania style.
It looks great to me, not particularly overloaded, but if I had to make some criticism it would be:
- Colors are indeed a bit similar and there's not a lot of contrast in the scene. I'd try to lower the effect of light on the scene's contrast and colors, try to make the blacks actually black. Currently there's no black in the scene, just grays.
- There's a lack of feeling of depth to the scene, everything seems to be in the same plane. It's very hard to parse the counter as being closer to the camera than the character behind it, to parse the lockers as further back, and the wall even further, it's all an intellectual effort you have to do after recognizing what each object represents. Same with the lamp, chairs and tables. This is made worse because of the first point; as there are no hard black (or even dark) edges to separate individual objects apart, it all kind of blends in into a single complex shape (which is possibly why it parses as overloaded to you).
- A lot of the objects are made of straight vertical and horizontal lines, making the scene look a bit cuadriculated and inorganic. I'd try to make as many of the objects as possible use more edges that aren't X or Y oriented, or curved / irregular lines.
The depth of the scenes are one of the main reasons I decided to rework all the stages currently included, I'm having difficulties solving this exact problem: everything looks flat.
I included a shader to at least outline layer tiles to show differences. This is quite soft currently, so I'll try upping the strength of the outline. I'm also still working on the skybox tint, the lighting should soon be applied differently depending on the texture.
How would you approach this problem? I though about either modifying the colors to be darker based on layer order, or introducing Z coordinates and let the API handle the depth by going with 3D rectangles. I tried the 3D approach before, but that introduced graphical artefacts.
