Game project – The week of the Trees

First of im gonna start with talking about the last post. In the parallax picture you could se a soft mist around the mountains. I changed that to fit the art style we are going for.

Here you can see it. I made a swirly and strong mist instead of the soft one.

And now to what I have been working on this week.

Trees I have mainly worked on trees for the background. I don’t know how many I have done during the past 3 weeks, but finally this week I have gained the ability to draw trees that I feel kinda happy with. I have worked a lot to get the tree trunks right, I have gotten a lot of help from Christoffer, our lead artist, with making them look good and teach me how to do it. Later I will have to work more on the leaf parts of the trees to get them to look better.

Today I also realised that you could reuse the trees a lot in the background if you made the tree trunk alone first and then put on the leafs. So you could re-use the tree trunk as a dead tree or just pop on another batch of leaves.

Here I show what im talking about.

To make the trees I use the software SAI. I first start of with making a very rough sketch of how I want the tree trunk to look and all its roots. Then I make a line art to get the feel of how its twisted around or formed. Then I clean the line art so there isn’t any line going over another line where it shouldnt. Then I make the part that is the leaves, On that I work a little more different, I jump straight onto making the line art and then clean that up. Then after im done with that I use paint bucket to color the different parts of the trees. As you can see if you look at all the pictures in this post is that I havent done any shading on them yet. We have yet to discuss how we want the shading to be done in the art for the game, and it will be a quick thing to fix. What I also havent done yet is to add some grass to the trees, around the roots. I will probably do that too later and it will probably not take much time to fix that either.

Below there are some more trees I have been working on today. With these two trees I thought I would make a couple of trees that could work and be placed together in the background. They also give a kinda sad feeling when you look at them, so they will be perfect later in the game were it gets more dark and sad in the environment.

The next two trees have a little more happy look to them but can be changed with color or changing the leaf parts. Also taking away the leaves will make them look dead, just add a little more grey to the tree trunks color. Then they can be used for a more gloomy and sad area of the game.

What I also have been working on is a background object of two trees holding a big gong together.

The first drawing is from 2 weeks ago and that is seriously the best trees I could do at that time. Now this week I know and have learnt so much more thanks to Christoffer, and the second drawing is proof of that and also the other trees. I worked a lot on that. At first there were two trees kinda just standing right up holding a small gong. Then I remade them and make them tilt away from each other and the gong which makes the eyes go to the to the middle and the gong. But the trees looked to thin and weak so I made the bottom part of the tree trunk a lot bigger and thicker so they looked like they could support themself and the gong. Then I made the gong bigger so it looked much cooler. Then i added a japanese kanji to it and some lightening reflections. If you wonder what the kanji stands for, its neko which means, cat.

Well this is it for this time. Next time I might talk about level design, Bye.