Week 2 – Game Background, part 2
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This week I have been working on improving our background for the game. Last week we had our first version of the background but we soon noticed that the background made the game feel very fast and enhanced. It was hard to make the avatar match the background and the game-area felt very short. If the avatars was in scale with the background they became to big and there was no room for the avatars to avoid the incoming enemies. For that reason we/I had to redesign the background.
Before (last week) After (this week) At first we thought that it might just be a question of scaling down the image but I soon realized that it wasn’t going to be that simple. We tried to just scale down the buildings but it still didn’t feel right, the road became way to wide and the game-area still felt even shorter then it did before. After this test we decided to implement a little math and calculated how wide the game-area would be if the player only played within a 4:3 format, even though the background was in a 16:9 format. We then discovered that the buildings (who defines the game-area) had to be much closer to the middle then we thought. But as soon as we had this information I could easily move the buildings into position and we could try again. When we testet the game with these conditions it felt much better and we could scale down the avatars to make it even more smooth. One problem that occurred when we scaled everything down was that I hadn’t made full-sized buildings in the first place, so when the smaller buildings moved away from the edges of the screen there was a gap that had to be filled. But because I had made all the parts to the buildings in different layers it didn’t take long to fill up the missing parts of the buildings. The reason why we had to this right away was because we wanted to know if we needed another design entirely or if the background just gave an illusion of being very short. As it turned out it was just an illusion and we could fix the problem relatively quick. We also wanted to know how big the avatars should be to be in scale with the background and it was kind of hard to do without knowing how the background was going to look like (what scale it was going to be in).
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