Hey everyone!
Andrew here bringing you a quick show n tell on how we approach decorating a level for Blightmare! It's quite simple. We tend to do it by layers. Far background, immediate background, foreground, and extreme close foreground. The interactive objects such as lightbugs and ladybugs all exist on the player layer which is between the immediate background and the foreground. It's easier to explain with pictures so lets just jump down below and have a look!
RAW LEVEL FILE
This is what a level looks like after our level designer Nick has placed the player ground tile set down where he wants. Then after that is finalized I go in and start decorating.
BACKGROUND
The first part is the background. Its the furthest away so it requires the least amount of time. Just adding a hill and a tree is filling up the lower part of the screen quite nicely.
IMMEDIATE BACKGROUND
This layer exists directly behind Blissa and usually is the most time consuming. It has the largest list of art and therefore has the most decisions to make when creating a visual space. Do we want this area to have a lot of mushrooms? Or A lot of trees? Or both? Or maybe none. Maybe its just an open field! What is holding up the boardwalk and how? These are the small decisions that should be considered for each section of each level that can make a big difference. We don't want the entire game to look the same all over, but at the same time we also want it to look familiar.
FOREGROUND AND EXTREME-CLOSE FOREGROUND
This final layer is similar to the first background layer. A very small amount is applied to the foreground. We don't want to hide Blissa but at the same time we want the place to feel natural and full. Oh and don't worry about all the dots, those are neat little handles for us to grab when we want to edit them. SUPER helpful thanks to our awesome programmers.
IN GAME!
Finally when we press the play button it looks like this!
Thanks for reading this short decoration process for Blightmare! We are excited to bring the world of Blissa's dreams (And Nightmares) to life for you! Please head over to Steam to add Blightmare to your wishlist and follow us on Twitter for all the latest updates.