Glad to hear! >u<
Since you shared an image of your game, I have a bit more to say.
Your character art is good, and it is good to be consistent with your art, but not only should your art be consistent from character to character, but it should also be consistent with the game. Now I do not mean that your characters, and backgrounds all need to be the same. What I do mean is that, right now you are using A high-quality version of your character art in game, but when you use it as a sprite in-game, those lines get too small. This goes back to the point I made about thin and thicker lines. One thing you can do to help with consistent, such as with line thickness, is to always make sure to use the same line thickness for everything (but the background can be different). When I say, make sure to always make line thickness the same for everything, I mean. if you are going to see the character, 1 close up (such as when you are talking to them), 2 as a sprite, or 3 as a background character,
in all three cases, you should redraw the character.
Yes this is more work, but it really helps keep your art consistent, makes your work (the game) look professional, at it helps the viewers. When I say redraw, I mean, and you can practice this, with the same pen size, on the same layer (or piece of paper), draw the character when she is close up, when she is standing, and when she is in the background. So being consistent in this case means, using the same pen size for everything, but when you draw images that are closer or farther away, you are just drawing the characters smaller or bigger. The point of doing this is to avoid resizing your images. Resizing your images (if you are going to show the image at multiples sizes, such as a sprite and also as a close up) is a bit lazy, and even if you are not trying to be lazy (which that is not bad, I am trying rework my art to maximize lazyness to increase my art making rate), viewers will still see it as lazy, just because resizing your artwork is not professional.
It is ok to draw your character big, and then scale it down, if this is your workflow. However, every character should be scaled the same, and you should not show any images at multiple scales unless, as I said, you redraw it so that your image fits the new scale/zoom).
When I say the characters should be consistent with the game, not only should the characters have the same line thickness, but to help make your game feel and look professional, you should also make your User Interface icons, such as button, that potion bottle and shield thing, also all share the same line thickness and art styles. The point of this is to make your art consistent, so that your character art style is harmonious with the rest of the art style the game has. This way your game does not feel so cut and pasted together.
Now something that is tricky is the
background. this is still something I am trying to master. From what I can tell, unless you are making a black and white comic, your
background should never be the same style as your characters. Why? Well as far as I can tell, the reason for this is that you want your characters to stand out from the background. Part of the goal with making art is making it easy to read for the viewers, the characters are the important part so you should make sure that the players focus on looking at the characters.
You don't want your viewers to think, you don't want them to work, have to search your art, or have to squint. This is because you are making a game, and in this case it is safe to say your viewers have a very short attention span and do not want to work, so you have to do most of the work yourself. This is the same reason why you don't want to scale your image down, if the lines are too small then people have to squint and look closely and study it in order to see the details. part of simplifaction is to remove the unneeded details and only point out the important details. Thick lines help with this, and in the case of seeing the character some distance away, redrawing them with the same pen further simplifies the image (since some details will be lost when you make a smaller drawing). In fact, if the character is so small, that you can no longer use your style or see what you want, you can change your art style to something more like drawing a chibii or an icon instead. This way you focus on just the key stuff (such as the eyes, expressions, body shape, or just maybe a name if that is all you can represent if all you can show is a green dot). But if you still want to communicate something important, but it is a fine detail, such as the small slime detailing you do, or the highlight in the hair, then in these cases you may want to draw a zoom in, to show off specific details, as if the character was studying the girl. this way you can still show what you want, show off your art skills, but then the sprite can be simplified for the battle(?)
Getting back to the background. If you make the background and the characters in the same style, the issue is everything looks the same. it is ok if you do just characters and the user interface, this is so players get the feeling that everything is consistent. But once you do the background in the same style, then too much stuff looks the same. It becomes an issue where viewers have to search the image to find your character, or your character seems lost or not all there because they do not stand out, it is as if you are not actually focusing on them. From what I can tell, different things work for backgrounds.
as far as I can tell, backgrounds using lines only works with backgrounds that have little to no shading. teh lines of the background must be medium to thin as to not distract away from the lines of the characters/user interface, and typically it is safe to have the background colors a bit desaturated when compared to the character's colors. Also try to keep lines at a minimum, the more lines there are in teh background, the more that means you are adding details to the background, and details and lines are distracting, which takes the player focus away from the characters.
In anime and other artworks I have seen, you could draw the characters, but have them on a painted background, and this looks fine, in fact, it doesn't even stand out unless you actually study the artwork and notice that the background is hand painted. from what I can tell, the trick to getting this to work is that the majority of the artwork should be a certain value, the character should also be the same value, but the background could be a bit more desaturated to help the character stand out. again this only works with painted backgrounds but, say you have a character who is sitting under a tree and you are looking down at them. they are in the shade. if the background is painted, and the shadow covers most of the area you are painting, the character and the shadow should have about the same brightness (or at least what makes sense, often characters are a bit brighter if they have white skin or if teh artist wants to make them stand out a bit, or simulating global illumination), and the area not in the shadow can go ahead and be very bright. The character should not be bright since most of the background is not bright. There is also the opposite, think of a town during night time, lit by torches. if you are standing in down, and the walls of the building in the background are lit by the torches, so much so that the brighter areas take up more room then the dark shadow areas, then your character should also be lit by the torches, or at least most of them. If the town is far away, but still most of the background is lit, but your character is not (because you are standing outside of town without a torch), basically the issue is that the character does not fit or match the background, and so the image looks wrong.
Right now that is the case you are working with, you have a painted background. In fact it looks like you are already trying to achieve what I have already said, the cave is dark, but you paint it so that the closer areas are well lit, and your character is bright. So far I actually like the work and think your background is good, but if you want to improve it, here are three things I would recommend.
1 I think its pretty cool what you are trying to do, with the floors, the walls, and the background that looks further into the tunnle. To try and help make it so it looks like the character fits into the background (without getting lost) I would work on trying to make sure that the character and the background have matching values. Meaning, I actually think the floor and walls look nice, but you could redraw the image of the cave to better match the brightness of the walls (but only where it is lit, it may be a good idea to keep doing what you are doing, where you have the tunnel get darker the further down it goes).
2 doing number 1 might be a bit tricky, or take a bit of practice, but here is a trick that you can do, and also do for the floor and walls, to try and reach that matching value without making your scene all look like one color. The trick is to exaggerate! Just like as I mentioned with shading, going a bit heavy with the shadows actually tends to help. Something similar also tends to work out well for teh background. you could make it as if there was a bright light near the girl. so the floor, the wall, and the tunnel are all lit bright and about the same. Such as if she was holding a torch, a firm amber would be used on the floor, walls, and tunnel. You would use the same amber yellow on all three, you wouldn't make the floor brighter because it's the closest thing. Yes making the floor brighter would be more realistic. But that is an unnecessary detail. If you make it as if all three are lit equally by the same light/painted the same, it helps keep the image simple to read and harmonious in palette colors. After that, since your character is brightly lit, that means most of your background should be brightly lit so that the two match. So that means most of your background should be painted as lit. It is safe to have your character stand either in front of the darkness of the tunnel or next to a well-lit wall, as long as the majority of the background is lit, this should work fine. In order to exaggerate, that means you need to make the shadows dark, and it means that the light may not smoothly go dimmer down the tunnel. right now the background image of the tunnel is kind of dim, kinda the same color, and then fades out to black (the issue is that this is smooth, too smooth to really stand out or be important). We are fixing the issue of being dim by matching the same light effect (painted) with what you will use for the floor and wall. We will fix the issue of it being kinda the same color by having the light be bright like the character, and then we have it get very dark. This shouldn't be a smooth fading transition. Instead, the change should be rather noticeable and abrupt. and this should affect the tunnel image, the walls, and the floor equally (in real life this wouldn't be realistic but it will help with the art). what I mean by that is. say the light is by the girl, she is holding a torch. because we want most of the background to be bright, we also want this to be true for the sub-elements (the background, the walls, the floor). so we paint a big bright spot that is brightly lit by the torch. before the floor connects with the walls, or the top and bottom, it should then suddenly 'transition' to no longer be lit. aka, the base color of the floor. This is not a hard edge, like a line, it should just be obvious that the torch is no longer lighting the area. For the background of the tunnel, you could have two shadows. you want to avoid blacks, whites, and greys. this has to do with color theory. basically these are ugly colors. it is like you mixed your paint together to make crap. Instead there as others have mentioned color theory. It already looks like you are trying to use it a bit. Instead of having the walls and floor grey, try to give them some color, it looks like you are making things slightly purple to make things look magical (I also think it's pretty cool what you are doing with the colors). You are going to have to do a bit more if you want to exaggerate. You can have it so that when the cave is not lit, it is a dim (not nessisarily dark) purple. you could also do blue to make it seem cold, but I think purple may be better, more natural (between a warm feeling reddish purple and cold feeling blueish purple, to full-on dim blue/cyan). this is act more like a base color. Optionally, if you don't want to use these colors, you could use brown, like dirt, since it is not grey it is better, but then everything looks like dirt instead of like rocks. as far as I can tell, rocks only really look good if in a bright area, and the rocks are small, or if the rocks/cave is taking up most of the screen, they need to be dark. they do not look good if both dark and brightly light. even with the really far away part of the cave, instead of pure black, it should be every so slightly (almost undetectable) purple ( or whatever color you pick), but not black. never use black for darkness or shadows, always use a color. Hence the reason to exaggerate things by using these colors and a bit of color theory. For the torch, it can start for a very bright and desaturated yellow almost white, go yellow but not fully saturated, and a bit dimmer, then go orange before doing to a mildly dim and desaturated purple (no light from the torch is illuminating the surfaces at this point now) then a dim (and saturated) purple. In real life, bright things tend to be desaturated in tone. This also works for art, but because we want to exagurate things, this usualyl mean we want saturated colors, so what works out better, is just to make sure that dark colors are heavily saturated, and brighter colors are in the middle, while brightly lit objects tend to be the most desaturareted, but rairly fully desaturated. The only time you want to use pure white, is for something reflective, like the glint of the sun off a wave, a jewle, but only use this sparingly. Lastly, to make it clear that you do want to transition over a wide value range, as in, you want to have both bright spots and some dark spots on sub elements. So this includes the walls that are close to you. Right now they are well lit, which makes sense in real life. for your art, you may wantto make it so that it is as iff the light comes from the characters, not from you, as teh wals get dimmer closer to the edge of the screen. not realistic or accurate, but it keeps the focus of the playerc in the middel of the screen.
wow that was a lot, sorry about that. All of that may have been too much, I may try to make a painting tomorrow if that helps. Since there will be more color if you try this, to make those other colors stand out you may have to make them... bigger, like full on crystals instead of the cool surface effecs you are using now.
lastly 3 one reason poeple may say yor art may not look good would be that the painting is noisy. Now this is both a good and a bad thing. I have experimented with this myself. sometimes we don't want an image to be too flat. adding noise help things look much more natural and nicer on the eyes. the issue is that you don't want this to blanket everything, otherwise the pattern (such as a paper texture pattern) stands out too much. to fix this would be to dry to use step 2, but have it so say, tose crystals you see, instead of being dim, some are also brighly light (just like teh floor and walls) even though they are far away (and isn't realistic) just having the small details illuminated like this all over the place will be how you and noise (or clutter) without actually making the effect blanket everything.
also, what game engine are you using? Just thought I would ask.
also, do you have a color calibrated monitor, have you ever calibrated your monitor or ever heard of the idea befor? You may not realize it, but your monitor may be a bad monitor. meaning that it does not accuratly reproduce colors. If you notice some cheap school monitors, a white word document page may look a bit dim or yellow. those are TN type panel technologies, cheap, common, fast switching rate which is good for gaming but ugly colors. everyone has a monitor that is slightly different, so the art will look a bit different. the point of color calibration is to try to standardize your art, and try to make something that will work for most monitors. for example, my left monitor has a hard time with bright and dark colors, so when I move your image to it, I can hardly see the tunnel. The issue with art not showing well on some monitors is an issue that may never die, and something you may not ever be able to overcome, it just comes down to a good screen and hoping it is good enough. If you are using any Apple brand devices, you should be safe. unless you bought a monitor just because it was color calibrated, it is safe to assume that your monitor is not color calibrated or even capable of +90 sRGB accuracy.
again I wrote more than I had plan, sorry about that.
