Menu Background

So far this week I’ve been finishing the main menu background. I think it turned out good, except I didn’t have time to add more playground things like a swing or some scattered toys. I decided to cut that to save time. But I still think the background works just fine.

Here it is without the menu buttons.

I am rather pleased with the result, I didn’t use any strange techniques or anything weird. It’s all done with a couple of layers. The bottom layer has the sky color, over that is the city in the distance, over that is all the grass, the tree and the house, and over that is the shadow and light layer both in overlay mode and on top of it all is a little lens flare. Nothing hard to do, but it’s time consuming. Especially the composition phase, that took most of the time for me. for example were to place the house, how big should it be, what to have in the background, is the tree to big? all of that took ages for me to decide, but as I said I think it ended up pretty good.

I will continue the week with fixing up the art for the male and female characters for the gender selection screen, and polishing the map background. Adding a fence near the road and stuff like that. The two characters will get their rifles updated to use the yellow plastic version instead of the ones looking like plasma rifles, and then they will be used in the game menu. When you click on start game, you get to choose which one of them you want to play by clicking on either of them.

And then if I still have time this weekend I will do some splash loading screens for when the game loads the next level. nothing fancy so it shouldn’t take too much time. after that there is not really that much left on the art side, most of our animations are done by now, some polishing may be required though. It’s just a question of implementing them into the game.

So for the next week I will do a simple tutorial overlay that will be shown when the game first starts, explaining what the different bars represent and what you should watch out for etc.  And then some polishing of already existing art assets.

That’s it for me this week, have a good one.