Walking You Through the Background
First you see the character. It's hard to see beyond them with all their cool outfits and funny expressions. Maybe you even get to customize their hairstyles or uniform color too. I know. Characters ARE awesome. But have you ever looked beyond your awesome character to the environment they stand in?
Hello. I'm a background artist. I create places for your character to explore in. Maybe they navigate through a set of caves, explore a farm or dense city. I have made fish jumping out of water, flowing rivers and power plants that have a plume of steem rising from the top. And if you don't think backgrounds have any value yet, consider this: the background takes up more of the viewing area than the character does!
So what makes for a good background? Funny you should ask. It depends on the assignment. Like in Energy City, I had a set of directives before I even got started.
1. A viewing area that's seen from way above ground, from a distance that is similar to an aerial view from an airplane.
2. A lot of little movie clips will show on the screen at the same time, probably in the hundreds.
3. Seven different pages of maps, all featuring unique cities and terrain
For the terrain I use gradients across the board, high chroma colors up front, grays in the distance. This gives the player a feeling that the bottom of the screen is closer to the player than the top.
The mountains have half transparent bases so they give the illusion that they blend in with the terrain. No matter if I place them on the high chroma part of the terrain or the gray part, the transparent foot of the mountains would allow the color of the terrain to show through.
I make the trees into individual movie clips at first, but it bogs down the frame rate, so I make clumps of trees later that work better in the game. A collection of many movie clips is always more of a memory hog than one movie clip with the illusion of a clump of trees imbedded in.
A lot of times I pick unique colors for one map and a whole different set of colors for another map. Or instance, one city features a sports stadium that has red for it's team color. So that whole city looks red. While another city resides in the desert, so all the buildings take on the pinkish setting of pueblo houses.
Game players like backgrounds with variety. I could get lazy and use the same buildings and trees for all the maps, but what fun is that?
For a game like Citizen Science, the backgrounds have all new rules.
1. The viewing area is seen much closer than Energy City. The game player no longer sees an aerial view of the world from the height of an airplane, now it's much closer, as if seen from the roof of a 3rd story building.
2. The mood is different for Citizen Science as well. This is no longer a congested cityscape, now we're simply enjoying a sunny day by the lake.
3. Some of the maps go from a 1970s setting to a modern setting. This puts the pressure on my schedule. Now I have to do assets twice, one for each time period!
The characters often dictates the size of the background. On the screen, Citizen Science characters, at least the in-world ones, are all about an inch tall. That means I would have to make bigger buildings maybe like 500 units long, so big in fact that I can't get the whole building on the screen at once.
This means that I spend much more of my time on building details, window panes and thresholds that give the wall a sense of thickness. On the other hand, for a building that's only 30 units long at 100 percent, the game player wouldn't see that kind of detail. The thickness of the threshold would just shrink into one line, and both lines would fight with eachother over which was being seen first. If I bother to create all that nonsense, the little building would come off looking gray and cluttery. So it's smart to create detail where detail is going to be seen. Otherwise a background artist is wasting their valuable time.
Mood is also an important factor to consider. A lot of times I put the character art right ontop of the background to make sure the colors and perspective doesn't clash. Citizen Science has a scene on the capital building steps. I chose a cheery white stone, because I want the game player to feel upbeat. The story behind the game is about how to keep the lake clean. So I chose colors that look like they're gleeming in the sunlight, that way there's a big difference when you see them all mucked up later.
Citizen Science features backgrounds that change from the hippy days of the 1970s to the modern days of today. Every game has deadlines, so I had to prioritize which items in the background change and which I didn't bother with. If I had all the time in the world, I could've stocked every shot with a sea of eye candy, but I couldn't. I chose to update the cars, add a satalite dish, add a WiFi poster, add growth to some key plants and add wear to some of the furniture. But I didn't mess around with modernizing the streets or making a whole new peir because that would take too long. Instead, I just picked features that were already made, and turned them into a modern version. When I did make a brand new item, I made sure it was plainly seen and really sold the idea that the 40 years had passed.
So there you have it. A little piece of my work day as a background artist. I know I'm making art that people aren't supposed to notice first, but hey. Just because something takes the back seat doesn't mean it's less important.