Environment

Sprite Sizing

We need to draw our sprites at such a size that they look good natively at 4k and do not need to be scaled up.

The most zoomed in that the game will be is 5 grid spaces high, and we will use this to determine how big to draw our sprites.**

4k resolution is 3840x2160px, so if we divide that height by 5 grid spaces:

2160 / 5 = 432px.

Therefore, if our unit of measurement is grid spaces, we know that each gridspace is about 432px high. We will use this as our scale for our sprites.

Our background will be split into tiles that we can reuse / mix.

Each tile is 7 gridspaces high, and 2-4 gridspaces “wide”.
- We are setting 4-wide as our max for now due to size constraints (the sprite is over 4k pixels tall if we go to 5-wide)
These sprites are at an angle just like the grid spaces.
Templates all tiles are in the google drive folder, so you do not need to determine how big to make the sprites (Lauren already did the exact math).
- You can leave parts of the template transparent (eg. for the edge of a roof)
- They look like this:

We will allow for multiple layers for both the back and front walls for some minor parallax
- Eg. cables hanging from the ceiling, rocks in the foreground, etc
- Here’s an example of what parallax is

Here’s another example on how you could split up a background into sprites:

(you would still need to extend the artwork like the above example for each tile)

The below example also shows how it will work:

The dark grey area shows the camera’s viewport at its most zoomed in and zoomed out for this specific setting
The background layers (the yellow and the teal) would be parallaxed in this instance (maybe the blue rocks in the bottom left too)
Youd want to split a lot of this up into smaller sprites (eg. the fences are a repeated pattern…)

Each district has a distinct colour palette and different designs/ setpieces.
Backgrounds will be lined.
- Lines will be thinner than that of character art
  - Use 5px for background lineart (characters are drawn with 10px lines)

The important aspects of what we see on our on-screen environment are the player characters + the tiles.
- The tiles are 30 degree angled.

“The air in The Pit is a thick, putrid smog - a result of the chemicals used to mine the quarry. Acid rain relentlessly pours from the sky.”

mining city in a ditch,
We want it to feel hot, stuffy and overheated.
Though district 1 and 2 are both hot in temperature, this district should feel more lived in. Though dirty, it shows that there’s a sign of life as the rubbish would have either been recent, or barely degraded with vibrant colours.
Though it being a mining city, it does not need to look fancy, most of the housing or buildings are either second hand or created from what resources they have, they aren’t really about style, they’re about efficiency. Unlike district 3 too, it doesn’t need to be pretty, just to do its jobs.
Though this is a sci-fi world, there are still uses of papers or nondigital means of advertisement or information, as though this world is still semi catching up, still modern, but have some technology that helps assist them, though not necessarily overbearing with technology.

“Due to extreme mining, water can no longer collect here, instead it runs off into The Pit, decades of this left the area as a barren desert.”

We want the feel of the environment and props to be dry and sun-bleached.
The second district should feel almost abandoned, like the environment has been uncared for and let nature take over. Though due to the large amount of sun and temperature, no greenery return to claim the land, turning it white, bleached, and isolated.
The only vibrant colour should be the sky, everything is either a pale version of its former self or completely bleached white.

very sterile as a base,
with a lot of neon ads and stuff everywhere
More technologically advanced, should be reflected more in the designs than the other two districts.
The colours are also a clash from the previous two, as it is more “cooler” in palette, organised and clean.
Should make it that when enemies damage, explode or is left in a pile, that they stand in contrast to the environment to represent that destruction and disorder is not a welcomed/common thing in this district.