Dragon Song Blogpost 2

Art

This week I have mostly concentrated on creating parallaxing layers for our game.

If you are unfamiliar with what parallaxing is, it is a technique where you have several images layered over each other moving at different speeds, slower in the background and faster in the foreground, that creates an illusion of depth.

So far I have created three of these images.

Since these images were supposed to be in the foreground, I wanted grass to be more defined, but this would present to much work for the time that I had. So I made the grass into small spots that litter a terrain of mostly dirt, so I added a colour scheme for dirt.

As for the trees, the trees in the background were as large as mountains and hills, but I did not want to have too large trees in the foreground because they would just cover up to much, and the depth that the parallaxing layers are supposed to give would disappear. But at the same time I did not want the foreground to be a barren land without the trees, so they are either a lot smaller or if they are tall enough to go beyond the players field of view, they were made thinner. Little did I know that these tall trees would present a different problem for the play testing.
Because the trees are cut off at the top of the image and because of how the current parallaxing code worked, it ended up looking something like this.

Eventually I ended up erasing all of the trees that were to tall and this was the end result.

I have also made all three images end the same way on the right and left sides. This enables us to chain these images together. This prevents the terrain from feeling like it is repeated and atleast adds some variation to it.

I have also made some improvements on the original background image. The original image was to wide and things were to spread out, and the game had trouble showing everything. So I have basically moved things closer together and made the image 2276×1280 resolution instead of the original 3800×1280.

I have improved the closest island, adding more details and thinner lines. I have also temporarily turned of the colourful glowing of the trees seeds, as well as added more reflections in the ocean and over all improved it a bit from the old one.

About Kristofer Karlsson

2014  Graphics

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