Of Mice and Pen: Pirate Art - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 235

Let's Get Environmental
The characters are coming along nicely, so it's time to start producing some levels for them to
inhabit. In most games, different levels offer a wide range of variation defined by time of day,
weather, and quality of light. Variation is also found in details such as location and the materials
objects are made from.
In the case of our pirate game, the silhouette aspect meant the environments had to be
distinctive in ways not reliant on color and other atmospheric details. Also, in some cases, to
ensure objects work as a single flat color, a little simplification of form is required (see Figure 10-
15). This is particularly applicable for some deep background objects where finer detail could be
lost, or make it harder to recognise the shape. For example, a bush or tree that is used as a
foreground object might have some leafy definition added within its mass (added using the same
Eraser/ deletion method as employed with the characters), but these details are not required if
the tree were to be used as a distant object. Any excessive detail in a piece of the deep background
would serve only to distract the eye of the player. Even if this distraction were slight, after a while
of playing, the cumulative effect of this “messiness” in the background environment would
become tiresome, and this is the last thing a game should be. As with any piece of art, knowing
when to reign in the detail is of paramount importance.
Figure 10-15. Simplifying form for background objects
Luckily, the themes and objects associated with the pirate concept lend themselves very well
to the art style arrived at during the concept phase. Boxes, rigging, masts, barrels, treasure chests,
and all the other things you are likely to find on a pirate ship can all be rendered legibly in
silhouette, as can the wooden huts, trees, and various other plants and platforms that inhabit the
different level environments.
The process involved in building the raw art for the levels is the same as that used to create
the characters: pencil drawings are touched up with ink, scanned into Photoshop, and turned
into solid black shapes. The detailing process is similar, too. The Eraser Tool is used as before to
define textures and add some identity to the shapes, such as the planks of wood that make up
barrels and crates, or patches on the caps of fungi. Although most of the in-game art was
traditionally drawn and “inked”, then scanned and finished digitally, it was easy to use
Photoshop to produce further unique or location-specific objects, using the existing material as a
jumping-off point. In this way, a broken crate can be produced by taking an existing whole crate