Environment Design

Lately I’ve been ultra focused on environment design for my 2D sidescroller game. The biggest piece of feedback I got on my first release of love you tender was that it was hard to see the player against the background. I had made the level look very flat without adding any difference in contrast/saturation between the layers. Lesson learned!

Synchronistically, (is that a word?) I stumbled upon a lovely video made by Noa Calice of Blackthornprod that has very simple but excellent tips on perking up the environment design of 2D games. I went ahead and started by implementing his “light” sprites to help adjust the colour and saturation of sprites and give them a bit of a faded look.

Mountains aren’t flat

Conveniently I just came back from a trip to north India at the base of the Himalayas where I spent a lot of time looking at the mountains around me. This helped me understand how when a mountain is farther away, the shade of it is lighter and it’s generally more faded out, whereas the closer mountains are clearer and darker. I’m sure this is the first thing you learn in Landscape Drawing 101 but I’m a self taught artist so this is a lot of trial and error for me.

A simple process

All I needed to do was create a new sprite that’s just a faded out white line. I dropped this line, (or maybe it’s a blob) into the Unity 2D editor and placed it as an overlay for each mountain range sprite.

I then layered it like a mountain-blob-mountain sandwich, basically putting a blob sprite on a new layer in between each mountain. From there I just used the sprite renderer to change the colour and opacity of each blob, resulting in a faded look for each mountain layer.

I also stretched out the mountains, flipped them around, stretched the blobs, and generally just played around with it all to see how I could create different environments. Also I removed the grass sprite I was using before, as well as the dirt. I didn’t like them much. Finally, I changed the tint of the skybox to see how that affected the environment feel, to great success!

Results so far

Here’s a first glance at what I came up with so far. My favourite is the bluish purple one.

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Just the beginning

I’m already getting so many ideas. Maybe I can programmatically have the hue of the blobs change as the player progresses in the level. They can start off as a yellowish, brighter environment then I can emulate a sunset over time that darkens the level into more blue and green tones. I also want to see if I can adjust the mountain heights as the level progresses so that it won’t be the same repeated pattern for the whole thing.

I’m glad that even though Unity feels a bit limited in terms of 2D sprite manipulation, this workaround has proven to be very useful. I’m sure delving into the world of shaders would give me even more results, but for now this simple adjustment works well. Once I settle on the environment colour and design, I’m going to move to add in particle effects and animations to the background objects that are placed. Yay! This is fun 🙂

What do you think?

Which environment is your favourite? Any colour ideas, or further workarounds similar to this one? As always, I’m open to suggestions! I’ll be making a video soon with more detailed information about this process.

Much love to you all <3

Julia