FOURTH POST, FISH GAME
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Hello again. I am the designer in team shadhavar. Today I will be talking about the parallax background in our game. When the artists in my team took the task of creating a background image for our game, I told them that it would be nice if they could split all the different elements of the image once they were done. By splitting the final images layers and exporting them separately, it allowed me to recreate the background inside the game engine. Instead of having one single flat image for the background, we now had the different elements existing on different planes in game. By having everything on different planes, we could simulate depth in the image through moving the different planes at different speeds. Normally when applying parallax to a background, you would want the things that are further away to move slower than those that are closer. The reason for moving things that are further away slower, is because that is how perspectives in the real world works. In addition, far off things get a much grander scale when they move slowly, because they are something that is constantly in the player’s vision, like a mountain. For our game however I decided to go with a non traditional approach to parallax. Far away background elements move faster than those that are closer. The reason for changing things up with the parallax is because I wanted to do the opposite of showing grand scale. I wanted to communicate through the parallax that the environment was very small, like a fish tank. My thought process was; that if having far away things move slowly shows a larger sense of scale, then having them move faster must show a smaller sense of scale.
The perspective of having far off things move faster might not be the most realistic, but I do believe there is one case where it can happen. The case in question is when you are observing something through a hole, in which case the hole will limit your vision and perspective. When looking through a hole things that are closer to the hole will appear to move slower while things that are further away will appear to move faster, thus giving the opposite effect of being out in the open. I think the “hole” explanation is the reason why the parallax does not look completely out of the ordinary and gives a smaller sense of scale in our game. Hope this was a good read and that it gave you something to think about.  |
