Progress Update and Background Design

The game is coming along fine, the frame rate is stable and most of the base components are in.  Title screen and music are completed, level select and level complete screens are complete and obviously the actual gameplay basics are there.  Main task now is to tweak the gameplay till we are happy with it and start designing the actual level layouts.

Below is a quick screen shot of the test level we have running now.

I thought I would talk about the background graphics and how we are going about creating them.  The majority of the game takes place up in the air, so its a nice simple background of blue colour with multiple images of 3D rendered clouds (rendered in blender) scrolling past at different speeds (parallax).  Towards the end of the level we have our rendered complex background.  Each stage has a different theme and there are multiple levels per stage.

Below are 3 images of the creation of the winter level, the first image is the basic render I started out with.

First Version

The background is fairly simple but snow is difficult to render, hints and tips from Blender Guru are always helpful for any sort of blender work so I went there and found what I needed to make it look nice.  With regard to the design the foreground fir tree would be removed in the final image and rendered separately to be used as a parallax layer.

The second version of the scene.

Second Version

I added a lot more trees and sorted out the lighting a bit in this version, I also added the bright blue background so its easier to cut out in Gimp (bit like a blue screen) and make it transparent.  I thought this version was ok but once I put it into the game I realized there was an awful lot of white snow background scrolling past once you drop past the trees.

The third version of the scene.

Third Version

To fill in that space in the scene I added a snowman, what else could you add in a snow scene.  Once this background was added into the game it looked a whole lot better as it scrolls by, less white space and the snowman gives some perspective along with the parallax fir tree in front.

Hopefully we will have a video of the game to put online in the next few days. just a few more tweaks to the collision detection and we will be able to show the game up and running.