Creating a seamless background
Flight of the Giraffa – Update 2Yet another week has flown by, and even more assets have been implemented in to the game. This week I had to create a background for our game. We wanted the game to have a scrolling background so that the player will feel the movement when flying through space. When creating the background for the game, there were a few things I had to keep in mind. Firstly, the game takes place in space. So it wouldn’t make much sense if the background only showed a small portion of space, so when I designed it I had to incorporate the feel of distance in the picture. To do this I added a lot of stars and galaxies in the picture. The plan to make the atmosphere of the game feel as much as space as possible is to have it pan very slowly in the background. The second thing I kept in mind when creating it was to not make it “pop” so much. By this I mean that I didn’t want it to distract the player from the action. So I had to make something that would be pleasant to look at and at the same time not draw the player’s attention to much. This is how the background I made will look in the alpha-stage of our game:
The hard part about this was to make it seamless. This means that when the background is slowly panning, eventually it will have to loop. So the transition between the left side of the picture and the right side of the picture will have to be seamless in order for the pictures to flow into each other. So to do this I used the clone stamp tool in Photoshop. I took the entire picture, copied it so I had two of the same picture next to each other. Then by simply using the clone stamp tool I started to remove the clear seam that was separating the pictures, until there was no seam left. So this is what the background looks like when you loop it:
(Now you can even see the big dipper! :)) This background will work for our alpha, but there is one thing I plan to do when the game moves into the beta-phase. I have some of the stars placed on different layers in the file, so the plan is to separate them from the background and have them moving on a different layer that scrolls faster while in game. This will hopefully help make the game feel more dynamic. That’s all for this week!  |
