Pixel backgrounds and perspective

So I have been actually working on stuff for a couple days now. I have said that I will reboot Flicky Turncoat DX someday, but before I do that I want to get things right.


Foreground/Backgrounds are my priority right now. I have learned a few tips, like more shades of a single color for more depth...and that you should have different the colors all interconnected with each other, like a light "green" that turns into dark "blue" (colors in quotes can be any color) and that you should never have just complete black for shadows, it needs to be a shade of black dark blue or even black dark purple.


You may have seen this before in the SSRG IRC:





It is nice and all for a color shade test, but there are problems. It took up lots of space (while I saved tiles by having the red on the 3rd palette line and the blue on the forth palette line) and doesn't have much room for potential object and enemies colors. Also, while good on tile space the tradeoff is the perspective is a sharp drop. I think that is my problem. I am always concerned on saving tiles so I took the minimalist route when making art.


So I changed things around. I wanted to make something flat and seemingly infinite ground Sonic would be running on. Picked a color shade group and tried my best. This is a in progress result after a night's work:





I ran into lots of problems. I want things to perfectly connect, but also need to become bigger. You can only work with so much of a color shade at a single time. sure things get lighter in the distance and darker when you get closer, but there is so much space to cover that you are forced to stick to a single color for most of it. And another thing. Detail. You can only fit so much in that space. Everything becomes simple and like a doodle in mspaint. Add another shade color and you have depth, but since it is so small it looks like an extreme 45 degrees drop at that size which you don't want.


What spurned me on was a replaythrough of Ristar:





I noticed how Ristar's feet was and figured out that's how Sonic should be in Flicky Turncoat DX. Infact, all the art should take note of Ristar. If the colors seem familiar that's because I chose the above shades to mimic this level, and screwed around in making the under character's feet ground first. Tried the "higher shade than ground and lower shade than ground" to mimic the metal groove link things. When I when to making the background floor I never changed the shades.


Instead of detailing the background floor, maybe I should use the trick in this above level and make sprites as far away buildings attached to the background.


So yeah. This is a help/what I learned/what I have been doing/still confused/why won't you work thread.