Background: The Light Night
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Hello, today I’m going to talk about my aesthetic choices when making a background for our game. The environment in our game is depicted as made of stone with some rare trees here and there. For the atmosphere of the background I inspired myself from the background that is inside the tree right here:
The background I made will be seen because there will be ”cracks/holes” in this inside background. As you can see the mood here is dark but also has that faint glow that comes from the crystals, bringing a bit of light to it. To fit this mood I imagined showing some other trees with a pretty environment. I decided to put the background in ”night mode” so it fits this inside. However my first mistake was made at that moment, because I imagined a forest, but our designer corrected me on that, mentioning that it wouldn’t make for the character to choose one tree in particular which she seems to do in our game. I decided then to make the trees more rare on the picture. And I also drew too much cracks on the tree, which made it look weird, like glowing worms moving on the tree. A good thing that came of it was the idea to add alien looking mushroom on the ground, so the universe seems a bit more organic. Here was my result (obviously not finished) :
With the trees being scarce, I decided to remove the mountains, they would have looked imposing and making all the details for it would have been just tiring. Besides I thought there would be more interesting things to do if I had a bigger piece of sky to work with. The designer had the same idea as me which was to put some aurora in the sky. It adds the glowing effect I needed to fit the desired mood and make the composition more harmonious. In the end I also added a planet in the top right corner because the sky felt a bit too empty. I realized how filters can be useful and time saving, I realized I could simply modify the colors and contrast whenever I wanted, which helped me in the end when I was trying to figure out exactly how dark it should be in contrast with the lit parts. Anyway here is my result. Thank you for reading!
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