This week I have been working on making the game feel more lika an apocalypse. The previous backgrounds I have made are very colorful and doesn’t give the impression that you are in an apocalypse. Even though it’s suppose to be more of a normal looking block in the beginning of the game it was time to make it look more apocalyptic. Because the feeling of the game should be done by the Beta it was crucial that the background didn’t feel to calm.
The other weeks I have been working on the background I explained that all the buildings were separate objects that can be moved around to make new blocks to avoid monotony. Due to this I could easily use the same buildings and modify them slightly to give them a more apocalyptic feel. The first thing I did was to break the windows in the buildings. The way this was done was simply by taking brightest color of the window and with a 1 pixel pencil draw cracks. This turned out very good and it immediately gave the building a more damage feel. Secondly I did the same with the walls of the buildings, I simply took the color of the shaded areas of the building and used a 1 pixel pencil to draw cracks.
When all buildings had cracks and broken windows I thought I would give some of the buildings some extra damage(They felt to whole). So some of the them got their cracks upgraded to edges of the buildings.This basically mean that i deleted a part of the building to make i look like it had fallen apart. I then had to make the new edge look realistic enough, but it wasn’t a very long process because of the perspective.
Test-images (not actual in-game background)
After “destroying” all the buildings, I had so carefully built up, I toned down the color of the facade. The bright colors they had from the beginning felt a bit to clean for a apocalypse. Some of the buildings got to keep some of their original color between cracks since I thought this made i look like the color had fallen of the facade. But even though I was fairly satisfied with the end result of all the steps above, a member of my team thought it would be nice to use the Burn-tool in Photoshop for an even more apocalyptic feel. And after testing it on one of the buildings a had to agree with him, it really made the final product look great.
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