Darkness Encoded (Progress DevLog 2)

Progress DevLog 2

Art | Background | Parallax

 This week was jam-packed and full of lots of everything. It was kind of difficult to remember as the weeks are already starting to blend. I worked on everything to do with the background and how challenging, frustrating and time-consuming everything is especially drawing my sprites. I made good progress and learned some useful features the hard way.

Background Assets #1

To credit myself as you do, the plan for the background was to take inspiration from my work from last year. I made a geometric style of fantasy art you could say. Anyway, I liked the style and I wanted to incorporate the style again into my game. I figured that grabbing a bunch of assets within Photoshop and then importing them into Unity was going to be a good idea, then I was able to tweak the layers and size until I was happy with the layer. So, I did this, and it looked good the problem occurred when I wanted to tile this asset. I made it into a prefab and that is when I realised my mistake, I wanted to combine all the layers into a smaller more manageable project, as it was a shocking list of parent and child layers. Then I thought okay it will be fine I can just take it back into Photoshop and fix it there and then put it back into Photoshop once I’m done. Well, I will cut to the chase and say that wasn’t the easiest to accomplish, turns out that moving files back to Photoshop isn’t ideal and easy as the other way around.

Prefabs & Infinite Background

Continuing. I had begun to realise I had messed up when it came to my background assets, but I was too stubborn to give up and redraw them, besides it looked too cool. I used prefabs to condense the mess, but I would for some reason continue to tweak the prefabs and I was hyper-fixated on making it look perfect, little did I know. This led to my many prefabs and the mess continuing. The learning curve is a steep one, yet I begin to work on an infinite background. Like many endless runners, it is easier to have the background loop in a sense, where there are 3 backgrounds, and the aim is to have the camera always have the background visible. Using scripting a leapfrog effect is born as the background is dependent on the camera location in the scene. This solves 2 issues, firstly not having to build out an entire level by hand and secondly, having the end where I decided rather than having any limitations a standard platformer has.

Parallax Effect & Background Assets #2

the parallax was a new technique I stumbled upon. To create an immersive experience for the player and provide perspective for the distance travelled. I must thank Dani Krossing’s Video on this as it helped me bring this concept to life. Having multi-layered parallax is a cool feature of the game so far and the original background assets broke it entirely. the concept of it was working but I had no choice anymore and put my pride to the side and I had to redraw my assets in Photoshop. It was the right decision and I think overall it looks better; I know for the future now.

The game is looking good now and I am so proud of the style of art it suits my style and I think the darkness-to-light effect will work wonders with the style. Good process this week there is still more work to do with the background but establishing this gives me a great visual of how it is going to look.