Blog Post 4 – Pine Trees
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Time to talk about something else than bugs! Since Beelonging is set in a forest we of course had to have some trees, since it would look pretty empty otherwise. Me and Natali (the other artist in our group) planned some background assets that we then split between us. I decided to make pine trees, since I think they’re beautiful and because we decided to have a North European taiga forest in our game. We thought that featuring such a forest would be interesting since its rarely done, at least not in children’s games or cartoons.  I started out by drawing the trees with pencil in my sketchbook. To make them look somewhat realistic I looked up some reference images. When I was happy with how they looked, I scanned the image and brought it into Photoshop. There I adjusted the sketches somewhat, mirroring them to make sure they look good from all directions etc. The next step was to fill in the color. We had decided to go for a “layered” look with the colors, where the outer layer is darker than the inner layers. Aside from looking visually interesting this helps make the background assets look different from the interactable objects, npcs and the pc which have more flat coloring and distinct black line art visible. Sticking to the layered look also makes the background assets look coherent, even if they’re produced by two different artists. I initially struggled a bit with the layered coloring, but after a few attempts I managed to produce something that looked like it fit in with the other, already done background assets, and that was visually appealing. The reason why I was struggling was because pine trees have quite complicated textures, and two different surfaces that have different colors. As you can see on the finished assets they have a more grey, rough bark on the lower part of the tree as opposed to the finer texture and more orange color of the top part. Two important aspects I considered during the process of making the sprites was that they had to 1: not have any too distinct features and 2: be relatively simple in their design. If the trees have distinct features there’s a risk of the player recognizing that the same aspect keeps being re-used, which would make the game less visually appealing. The reason why I tried to make them simple was to cut down on production time, so I would be able to make four trees instead of only two. If the trees, which are background assets, would have too many details there’s also a risk the player could be distracted from the more vital game play assets. And that’s it for this post! Thanks for reading
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