Game Project Week 8 – Adding Details

This week I continued my work with the environment adding details which I have covered in an earlier blog post so I’m just going to go into more depth about the work flow.

I started to fringe the edges using a couple brushes that I created earlier. I placed the fringe in a layer which is placed underneath the texture layer, at that point it looked pretty badly and nothing like a thorn piece of clothing, which I was aiming for. I wanted to get rid of the sharp edges that were between the texture layer and fringe layer. To fix this I used an eraser in a low opacity to try to blend and blur the layers together. I consider that by doing this I got a big visual improvement. Yet it still looked a bit flat, so I created a new layer and placed it on top were I additionally draw some lighter fringes to create the feeling of more depth.  I am planning to add a shadow layer to create even more depth to the surroundings. However I haven’t any pictures to show you guys yet.

There weren’t any problems of placing the fringes except it took some time to get started; also I went through every room three times which was fairly time-consuming. But by doing this I got a result that I’m satisfied with. Although it doesn’t look exactly as I had imagined before creating the surroundings and it doesn’t have the details I was aiming for, it still looks pretty good and will work for the game.

I’ m worried that I will not be able to create as much props for the game world as I want. The risk of not having enough props is that the game may look boring and that the level design will suffer since most things in the level will look too similar which might make the player disoriented and not being able to know were he/she is. We do have a map but the map is more like a guide which will not allow the player to see exactly where he/she is.

Even though I have tried to optimize the work flow as much as possible I think we would have saved a lot of time if we might have chosen to use some form of tile set instead of drawing every room individually. That would have been helpful if we sought to change something in the level design later, as it looks now we are not able to change anything due to that it would take too much time. Another thought I have about our choices in this game process is that we might have been able to create a more detailed world if we would have chosen a smaller game world. Our current game world is very big and that requires more props and details to make it visually interesting which I am realizing now might not become the number one priority in this process.

That’s all for this week, have a nice weekend!