Background in the making
|
For the two last weeks, I have been creating the background for a game called ”Crown of Creation” that I have been developing together with my group. The background that I was to make is supposed to be set where the player operates in the game, which is the inside of a crystal tree. What I needed to convey for the inside background art was a stone-material on the edges that would resemble the bark, and crystal material on the inside, kind of like looking into a crystal rock:
To reach my goal, I made a big amount of different background versions that eventually became our final background image. In this blog post, I will talk about my work process, show some art examples and also give a short reflection of what I have been learning from this. I began my task with making basic sketches of the background simply by using colors that me and my group decided together on having. In the beginning, I did two different sketches, one in blue tones and one in purple tones. I proceeded on the blue since that was what the group preferred.
After having the base colors for the background, I put in one of the crystal assets that my art director had created. The reason for doing so was keeping a consistent art style that would fit in with all the other elements in the game. After adding the crystal, I mass-copied it, reshaped the copies into a several different sizes and forms and changed both color and hue in different ways.
I continued to recreate the background over and over to see if I could achieve something not too voluminous since I realized that the depth could be problematic when the creatures in the game are going to crawl inside it. Below is an early version of a less voluminous background:
As I went on with the design we realized that the crystal assets in themselves had a lot of volume which contributed to the depth in the background, so the lead artist recreated a new set of crystals that I could once again mass-copy, re-size, re-shape and re-color that looked a lot flatter. The results after that looked like this:
The most challenging and time-consuming part of creating the background was deciding on its shape. I had a constant battle with myself of trying to stay away from making a background with volume, which I think would realistically make more sense since the inside of a tree would naturally look oval. However, this would not look optimal for our 2D game and could risk giving the main character and creatures the impression of ‘’floating’’ instead of crawling inside of the tree. Therefore, I needed to remake a background that looked flatter. Overall, I am content with the work process that I have been going through. There has been a lot of graphical challenges for me that I could evolve from as I dealt with them. Once again, I can not stress enough the importance of having frequent meetups with the team to improve the work efficiency, which I feel like my team has succeeded with. I have also become more aware of making sure my concept art is primarily enhancing the playability of the game, and that making sure that it ‘’looks good’’ comes second, which can be a bit challenging for me at times.  |
