Android 01. The background story

Introduction:

The aim of this project is to create an Android game with a team of four people and this blog shows the steps from my point of view. The game idea is simple: A space-themed side-scroller game, where the player spaceship's goal is to survive the level and gather as many points as possible. There will be 10 different levels, upgrades, various enemies, and obstacles to tackle and my first task is to create the:

Background

The Background might not the most important part of the gameplay, but it is all over the screen while we playing almost any game and it is an essential part of the visual aspect of it. We went through numerous amount of ideas before we end up with the one we liked and it was simple enough to work with in such time.

Parallax

Game name: Firewatch - Developer: Campo Santo

Parallax backgrounds are basically multiple layers of images with different scrolling speeds to create a fake 3D Landscape effect, where the back layers are moving slowly and the front layers are faster. The idea and visual part were promising, but the workload would be too much for creating unique designs for multiple levels.

The second idea is simple models placed behind the player space, but the number of objects could be distracting and also performance-heavy, so we had to scrap this idea too.

The third idea was something simple, scrap the 3D idea and go for something 2D with interesting patterns, so with the magic of Shader-graph and Voronoi noise, I created this pattern:

Looks interesting and also moves around like a living organism, but turned out the Bloom effect (the Neon-looking filter) is also too heavy on performance, so I had to scrap this Idea too yet again.

And after blood and tears, I finally found the solution, which is a 3D and color-based background. It is easy to create different variants and personally looks visually appealing.

The idea is to have different models with gradient colors and a foggy background and ground, not too distracting, and because we working with colors and no special textures, it is easy to create a variety of it. For the later version, we could have additional models to fit the level design (mountains, buildings, even something surreal like chess pieces) or particles effects such us rain, snow, or just simple dust floating around, but even with simple models the colors themselves just carry the visuals.

Thank you for reading! Here are some color varieties for extra: