2D Artwork in games

2D Artwork in games has for a long time been as staple of the medium.
From the pixel based graphics to the current more detailed artworks, there has always been a place for side-scrolling based environment, more so than a long time in this current digital age.

So with my idle hands cast aside,  I tried giving it a shot myself.
My first attempt used PhotoShop, I was going for a 'forest at night' vibe, so here it is.

Basic sky, more a test of how things would pan out, I tried having a stump in the middle of the frame to be a reference point for all three of my attempts.
I fade the trees to try and give a sense of depth.

For my next attempt I used the program Paint.Net

With more colour, added moon and trees it looks better. Although I faced the problem of you can see through a layer of tress into the next layer of trees.
Also the greens are a bit stark and not appealing at all, they're almost painful on the eyes.

My final attempt was also using Paint.net

 In this one I added better lighting from the moon with the stump being moved back.
The colours have been dulled, which not only is more pleasing on the eyes, but also better conveys the darkness required for a night-based scene.

For a scale reference of how it would with a character, I decided to threw in a stock vector (of which I take no credit for producing*) just for curiosity.

With a character now in place, it makes the forest come to life a bit more, giving a better sense of depth in my opinion than if there was no character in the scene at all.

However naturally due to copyright reasons I can't use Rainbow Dash in my game, however her height is roughly the height I wish to use for the original character which  I am  currently working on creating, but I will talk about that in more detail another time.


What I consider to be a shining recent example of 2D game envrionments is from Ubisoft's World War 1 game Valiant Hearts: The Great War, let me show you what I mean.

Here are three night time examples taken directly from the game.

Looking at these masterpieces makes me re-consider my choice of putting trees in the foreground.
The Paris example shows a great use of fading in the distance and the crash-site shows a wonderful example of scale to show how large something (in this case a Zeppelin) is in comparison to the character.


CREDITS:
Rainbow Dash Vector: Made by Scrimpeh, copyright Hasbro.
Valiant Hearts: The Great war. Copyright Ubisoft.