Art Guidelines
The game will be in a simple pixel art style. Overall, the following guidelines are very similar to Stardew Valley (although Stardew Valley has more complex shading).
Each floor tile will be 16x16 pixels, and considered roughly equivalent to 1mx1m. The player, plants and all other sprites will be proportional to this. E.g. the player is 16x32.
Each sprite will have a darker outline that matches its colours. The sprites will have minimal shading, with one base colour, one shadow colour and one highlight colour. This rule is loose and each artist can break it slightly if they think it works better and still matches the rest of the art.
(Colour palette expanded from mulfok's mulfok32 palette)
2/9/23 - #c5449c is added to this colour palette
To communicate that the game is not set on Earth, the primary colours used will be oranges, purples, and blues. The ground will be primarily orange. Plants will be in a wide variety of colours in a range of dark blue to yellow, with flowers and fruits being any vibrant colour. Tools and the player will have a range of pink-purple-blue as their primary colour to have increased contrast with the ground and plants.
During Sprint 4, every pixel art asset for the game was reviewed, with the vast majority being updated to align with these art guidelines. As above, having cohesive art direction and design is incredibly important for a video game. Cohesive design reduces player confusion as it creates a baseline for what certain objects look like, allowing players to easily remember how to interact with them and predict interaction patterns for new objects. Cohesive design can also lend itself to effective storytelling, as how a world looks greatly affects how it is perceived and moved through by the player. Some examples of before and after pixel art is shown below.
Before:
After:
More examples of updated assets:
