Bodacious Backgrounds? (week 9)

At the republic of cheerful, as my fellow comrades and I began to run out of Assets to create for the 3 Levels we plan on implementing into our project, I was asked to create a background for the single player mode which begins in a happy green and blue forest-like area and as you progress through your battles the camera slowly pans up and shows the destruction of the earth as you eventually find yourself in complete darkness.

What does this have to do with anything you ask? Well the single player mode has a backstory we created where the playable characters are an alien race and they host a tournament, which is holy to that race, on various planets, as this tournament ensues they slowly but surely destroy this planet by the time the tournament has ended. This backstory is never told to the player except through the visuals so hopefully they will get the gist of what’s going on.

Creating this background was one of the most time-consuming parts of the project that I worked on as the canvas was fairly large and utilizes pixel art to apply to the art-style of our game taking up a total of 4-5 hours for this one image. This was quite a challenge as I am much greater at character and object design than environment/background design. This is the background image below:

In all honesty I am quite impressed with how this turned out as like I said before I suck at environment design. For those that don’t really understand how that image will work in the game, the camera starts off in the bottom corner and moves diagonally towards the top right. The player will never see any of the black on the outside of the coloured areas except at the end where the darkness is intended, as the entire background is created to fit the exact resolution we are trying to achieve in our game. Do you like the work the Republic of Cheerful and I have been getting up to? What would you do differently? Let us know down below!