Environment Art Thoughts

 

We watched The Jungle Book the other night, and I love the backgrounds in it. They're soft, painty, and have a great sense of depth without becoming overly busy. 3D video games already do the thing where things far away look lower-poly & less detailed, but it'd be cool if you could harness that and turn it more into the effect you get in a painting.

A, uh... top-down game might not be the place for that to shine though. Maybe you could still work in some lovely traditional-media feelings?...

I love Tyrus Wong's pastel-textured concept art for Bambi—atmospheric, ethereal, dreamy, and I haven't seen that sort of thing in games. Probably because it doesn't play well with game engines at all. But I dunno, I certainly get inspired when I look at those, and there could be some elements that really align with a contemplative/calm tone, if that's what we end up going for.

One more note: I'd love to push the "color compression" of different spaces within the game. By that I mean be able to push more limited color schemes depending on context (biome, mood).

Like, ideally we could have a set of assets that we could get multiple color schemes out of--probably with shader/lighting tech, hopefully that would be enticing for Nate. ;) OR MAYBE WITH MULTI-HUNDRED LAYER PHOTOSHOP FILES. You can achieve anything with those.

This stuff isn't ground-breaking. But I didn't explore it too deeply in Wildermyth, and I think we could get some fun, evocative environments down the line.