Stuff to do

It seems like I am going through with this in the end, that much was obvious to me two weeks ago but now the background thing is set in stone in my heart. In this post I'll talk about the things I'll need to do to complete a background or two, an introspection into my dissertation, you could say.

• Concept Art
• Draw Backdrop
• Draw foreground assets
• Draw Background assets
• Draw Several Layers of backgrounds for Parallax Scrolling
• Learn Actionscript for Dynamic Animations and Parallax Scrolling
• Compile assets in Flash/Photoshop/Illustrator

These are in order of According to my opinion.

Concept Art

Completing this step would greatly help me plan out what kind of assets the backgrounds will contain in the foreground, the background and what will move and what won't. It can also help me get a good feel for the kind of atmosphere the background will have.

Concept art from last year for a game pitch I planned

Same as above

This is the sort of concept art that will help me plan the level, obviously on a wider level. The stuff in the foreground will be darker than the stuff in the background to draw more attention to the plane the player plays on.

Draw Backdrop

The backdrop is the literal background, the stuff that will take up the negative space in the open areas where there are no assets for the background, like the clouds or the ocean in the previous examples. The backdrop will usually appear on the lower-most layer.

Draw Foreground/Background Assets

Because I think it will be a bit hard to draw and animate everything as one, I thought it would be a smarter idea to include things with animations on them as separate assets that go into the picture but are never actually part of the picture.

This was I can focus on individual animations for the background, and apply code to them so they each either play at a different time, or are unique to each other in some way or another.

Draw Several Layers of backgrounds for Parallax Scrolling

To do this I would need to first know what I am drawing, and I will from the concept art, preferably as I do the concept art I will be drawing on different layers to create an authentic feel for the concept.

Learn Actionscript for Dynamic Animations and Parallax Scrolling

This will probably be the most difficult to do for me, but the least time consuming, in my opinion. to make the backgrounds have a much better feel some influence from code on the outside will be much needed, also creating the scrolling effect would be much easier with actionscript than straight up animation, it would also be more effective.

I will also be using code to make some of the assets more dynamic.

Compile assets in Flash/Photoshop/Illustrator

This is a no brainer, and I will preferably be doing this during the course of the project.

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This is a very preliminary list and some of the finer details are missing because I don't want to write a million words with very few pictures, but this is the sort of general thing that I will be getting up to.