Introducing: Colour grading

With this being the full behind-the-scenes pack I have to find more little tidbits for you all. So why not talk about a little topic that's been in the work today for me. Still very early in the works, but Colour Grading for Conway!

What's the idea behind it? Well, given that the character sprites and background images all are their own little thing you easily end up with a bit of a mismatch between them. It never quite feels like it smoothly fits together with the realistic approach that I'm going with, simply due to the fact that with the degree of realism in my artwork we tend to subconsciously look for everything to be correct and notice the mistakes more than for example a flat-coloured lineart piece.

So a way to unify it is to simply colour grade it in a certain direction, something that you see in movies very often and very often in very obvious fashions (think the green tint all over the Matrix movie, or the very common orange-blue in movies like Mad Max: Fury Road)

Ren'Py's functions are a bit limited and of course I'm also always in a situation of trying to gauge just what is the biggest bang for the buck i can have each month as the days tick away. So it wasn't super high on the agenda, but at last I sat down to figure my way into it.

In the attachment you can find the first attempt of it that just got finished today. With left being the old and right the new version. It's simply a screen layer that's being defined as a certain image (in this case the translucent overlay) which sits on top of the scene. There might be more elegant ways of doing it with Ren'Py, but this appeared to be the one that doesn't involve me futzing around with massive amounts of code.
The downside is that it really is just a translucent layer over the top of it. Which always limits my ability to truly get the effect I want. But RenPy is not photoshop and so i guess i have to live with it. It works well enough all in all, and should just be another little tickbox in the effort to have this thing look as good as it can possibly do.