Environment Textures and Vegetation
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2017-03-02 The spaces that the player will travel through in the deep will sometimes be lush, comfy areas and sometimes rougher, more hostile environments. This is meant to communicate to the player what they can expect to find, if they should be more cautious or if they can feel safe. This week I’ve focused on the sprites for the more lush and friendly environment. We are using the tool Ferr2d to let us edit the level quickly and easily. This allows us to create a single, short texture for the edge of a polygonal ferr2d terrain material which can then loop and seamlessly adjust itself to fit the intuitively customizable polygonal collider.The tool comes with a few example textures, which I examined in order to make my own. The textures were painted from start to finish in Photoshop using multiple layers and tools.   These textures may be subject to future iterating, but loop quite nicely as they are now.
Aside from these looping textures, I also painted some underwater vegetation. They have more purpose than to be simple decorations in our game, since they will guide and help the player through the darkness and make it easier to recognise each place and tell them apart. These particular sprites began as pencil sketches on paper and were then also created in photoshop using different brushes and adjustments.
Here is what they look like in a scene in Unity with some added lights and particle effects:
One of the plants is currently animated, when it is hit by the sonar it bounces and emits particles:
(The foreground elements are placeholders) Stylistic choicesI aimed to keep to my previously established shape language, where the safe and good objects are more rounded and the dangerous and hostile ones are more pointy and sharp. I have also stuck to more saturated colours for the friendly objects, in contrast to more washed out ones for the hostile creatures. Both of these design rules are reflected in my environment designs, as the vegetation (which is mostly meant to exist in the safe areas) is both using round shapes and vibrant colours. The jagged rock texture, in turn, is more washed out in comparison to the rounded one. /Felix Wahlström Lead Artist of Team Rukh  |
