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Hello, the third blog week is here!
During this week we have really made changes in the visual aspects of the game and I’m going to continue to talk about my work with the background.
This week started with a regular sprint meeting, where we sat down to set up our work schedule for the upcoming week. After it was finished we (the “graphic team”) discussed and created a color scheme appropriate to the vision we shared. It made a massive impact on the visual aspect of the game. We talked about what mood we actually wanted the player to feel, and from there we decided that we wanted a more damped tone of everything that’s going to be underwater.
To achieve this we decided to add a hell of a lot more blueish-gray color on all the objects in the background. This resulted in a more harmonious and realistic feeling of being under the surface.
Something we had to take into consideration is that when adding too much dark/gray color, the background/ environment could turn too dark – giving the feeling of a horror game.
The grayed background did also bring us broader opportunities to add more “powerful” highlights on objects that are more interesting for the player, like enemies or power ups, making them more naturally conspicuous.
A few sketches later we had a new color scheme and with that a better vision of how the game should look. Something I think we should have done earlier, even though we have been pretty satisfied with our earlier work.
I think that all of us in the graphic team found some extra motivation after this meeting. I can at least speak for myself and I nearly rushed home to get into work again. Here’s an example of how the background and a few objects will look with the new color scheme:
As you can see, it’s a total remake of all the tiles as well as the objects. It actually felt really good to start from scratch with the background, even though it was a little annoying in the beginning. Mostly because I feared that it would take a lot of time. But it showed that all the experience I’ve gained during the project happened to be even more than I imagined, covering a lot of things I didn’t even have a clue about in the beginning.
Another thing that eased my work is that my programmer finished the code that makes it possible for me to use my tiles in the program I mentioned last week (Tiled).
This system allowed me to implement the sprite sheet (one file where I organized all of my tiles) to the program, build the level, and then just save it to the game-code making it appear in-game.
I guess this could be explained better but as a mortal (graphic artist) I don’t really know how the immortal code works.
Anyway, this system made it a lot clearer for me and my work, since I can now not only implement every new change in the background in a few seconds, it also allows me to modify the speed of the parallax scrolling so I know how the different layers will affect one and another.
Before I go I want to give an extra shout out to Jonas Gardell and my programmer for creating the system for implementing the background, thanks!
See you in a week!
About Lukas Graff
2015 Graphics
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