I've been doing some mocking up for one of our game concepts. As you may know I'm not the primary artist for RH. Simon is busy with other things. My first attempt at a useful mockup was kind of cool but actually sorely lacking. After a trip to Simon for art director feedback I had a nice list of things I needed to address.

Standout errors included:

• Texture is homogenous, all aligned and boring
• The cave is too plain looking and awkward being made out of one piece
• The Rocket and basically the whole picture is lacking personality
• The Colours aren't interesting
• The Black shadow/background is ugly

So I started over and this is my second mockup:

I am sooo much happier with this version. The colours still need work and the edges of the objects are a little too sterile still. But it is a world ahead of the (now embarrasingly bad) first mockup. This new imaginary game just looks heaps more fun than the previous one!

I think the lessons to learn are that iteration is vital, input from others is valuable, input from a pro is invaluable and an amateur will rarely gets things right first try and might not be able to spot what went wrong. Thanks heaps Simon, you are a master of arts.