Just a little update. I've had a busy time recently and also was feeling run down with a cold, so hasn't been the most productive time, which is why I haven't posted for a bit. But I finally have something worth showing.
As part of the new secret level I was working on, I made a new jungle backdrop. Here is the backdrop placed into an existing jungle-themed level. Old orange one on the left, new on the right:
I'm much happier with the new one. My background artwork has really come a long way since the start of the project, I'm definitely finding my groove with it. The trick for me seems to be finding a level of detail that can be achieved over the whole backdrop without it taking hours to create.
The clifftop backdrop is another good example of improvements, this one on the left being from way back in 2014:
The process I followed for the new jungle backdrop is as follows:
1. The most daunting bit can be staring at a huge white canvas! A full screen background feels like a lot of space to fill, especially if the game typically contains sprites and tiles around 32 or 16 pixels in size. I take a screenshot of the game, cut out the existing background, and then put it into a non-pixel painting program (I use
ArtRage). I have a small cheap Wacom tablet so it's easy just to fill the space with colour and make a really rough idea of the colours and shapes of the background.
2. First pass pixel art over the top, really quick and dirty, just make sure the whole image is filled with big solid areas of colour. At this point I'm working in my old creaky version of Paint Shop Pro with lots of layers. I want to keep the layers separate so they're easier to save out for use in the game later.
3. Lots of iteration and refinement. It's best to do this in small chunks over a few days so you can keep coming back to it with fresh eyes. It can be helpful to do fill in a small section of the background with higher detail rather than trying to do the whole thing at once. My goal is to make the background look detailed, without spending countless hours on the pixel art, but without looking lazy and cheap. Hopefully I succeeded, I'm happy with it at least. During this process I still have the original screenshot of the game (with its background cut out) on a separate layer so I can overlay it on the new background and see how it looks.
4. Save all the layers out to separate images, and get them into the game. This process will obviously vary a lot depending how your background system works! Once they're in the game I can choose the parallax speeds for each layer, shift things around a bit, and then polish up the images, for example making them loop correctly at the edges.
Here's a timelapse gif of the above process. This is a slightly different version of the jungle backdrop for use in a watery level.
October is nearly upon us! I have more busy times for the first half of October, so I'm not sure how much I will get done. So there may be a bit of a dry patch. But my goal for October once I have time to get into some work is to make a start on some form of boss fight!
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