Criticism of screenshot for our Red project

taby said:
Looks bland eh?

Yeah, i like the ‘noisy’ image better too.
But maybe for a bad reason. I think the noise helps to hide issues, but it can not fix them.

The real problem is: The distribution of contrast and objects across frequencies and scales is not right yet. The flowers cause strong hf noise, making it hard to spot anything else. I need to focus. Only then i see two buildings and two characters. What i see immediately is a road, but in comparison the buildings / characters feel too small.

Idk which objects are important for gameplay, but they should dominate the image and focus all attention. Useful tools here are large size, more contrast (e.g. using bright / saturated colors and black contours), light and shadow, and animation. You can also (additionally) do the opposite of this, by reducing the contrast for the background. One idea would be to apply your noise ideas to a color palette (or layers) used for the tiles, so you could drive the color of the flower independently from the grass color, bringing them closer together if needed.
Ideally there would be just less contrast and noise in the high frequencies of the background, making it more subtle, so characters and buildings pop out.
This probably means you have to work on the lower frequencies then, since that's all you can do to make the background interesting. E.g. using fbm noise to vary the grass color smoothly across many tiles, and generating something like biomes, etc.

Duly noted! Thanks so much for the guidance, once again.