Moof Project - Background Sky Color Palettes and the idea of Time in-game

Hello to you all, been a bit of time, and in this time since the last, I've been doing a bit . Of ones pending being shown later on, the Boss concepts ALL have proper designs in place now, Moof himself is getting sprites made for his final needed poses and the other sprites getting their upgraded shading (only slow due to making new walking frames which are ALSO getting the shading, making more that needs it), and at the moment planning out how to make a proper boss fight work with the boss designs and their general concepts.

However, for the time being, wording very specifically chosen, I wanted to get into something else being worked into a good deal, the backgrounds for the levels, more specifically, the flow between each of them. I think I mentioned some time ago, I want to have each world line up in a coherent way even with the themes of them all changing widely, the way I thought to do that was a simple one.. TIME.

The world backgrounds all flow one to another through the idea of time, the time of day.

I wanted to make the entirety of the story involved to be a 36 hour period.

• Sunset D1, Isle of Moof

• Night D1, Prisma/Prisma Outskirts (the gem city)

• Dawn D2, the (currently unnamed) Snowy Mountain

• Day D2, (also unnamed) Forest location,

• Sunset D2, (ALSO unnamed, I wanna do smth clever with the namings of these) Desert

  and

• Midnight D2, Ashra's Airship 

Sunset of Day 1, to Midnight RIGHT at the end of Day 2.

Example: The Isle of Moof itself, pending updates to make the sand more natural, starts RIGHT at sunset, wanted to make it look more calming and pacific, and since the next world would be a major city, it's also late enough to make the city night and not look like travel took forever.

Immediately after the Isle of Moof is the aforementioned city, Prisma, the Night of Day 1 after trekking out from the Isle of Moof, only by a shorter time than outright day would have, while keeping the beautiful night city concept down.

I am working with this for EVERY background I do, because I believe while a story alone by action or words can convey one idea, the settings the events happen in equally make an impact, in this case that there's a problem big enough to last for a notable, yet not too long period of time.

Like telling about a character by their walk, their demeanor, or for some artists, in their eyes, I want the world itself to tell something by time, the time to travel between places, how long someone's been somewhere, it's small but I feel effective.

However, there is an idea in mind, which closes one problem, but opens another for a widely different reason. The sky itself I want to save time on and make the foreground pop out more by having the skies themselves be simpler, a gradient of colors that're simple enough to not make everything strain the eyes. Right now there is 4 color palettes. Night (City), Night,

Sunset,

and Morning/Day

The problem isn't of the skies themselves (despite still needing a Dawn color palette for one world), the problem is I am partially colorblind, and while I have ways to work around this easily enough, the problem comes at times like this. I'll probably need to get opinions on palettes soon because Sunset and some of Night make it hard for my eyes to see some of the colors. However, this should easily save time on part of the background making process.

That and I have concepts already for the other backgrounds, so I'm not entirely working off of improvisation either

...For all but the forest at least.

I feel like it's coming along nicely enough, slower than I'd like now as I feel like I have a lot of ideas but too much time taken to see if they're ones that should be added or not, but doing what I can where I can.

Doing what I can at the moment, hopefully will have more to show as time goes on, but at least for the time, that'll be all from me for the time being.