Worms Across Worlds - Environments
Environment art is not something I had a lot of experience with prior to this project but I ended up painting all the backgrounds for Worms Across Worlds (Apple Arcade). The challenge was to make the environment fun and bright but also push it back enough with the atmospheric perspective to not make it concurrent to the chaos of the gameplay. Each environment was designed to have separate layers of BG, midground, foreground and clouds to be detached and used for the parallax system of our game. A big inspiration was Rayman Legends beautiful bg work.
Each biome started with me making a concept of the general theme of the biome to inspire and guide the environment team. Then I'd provide the concepts for all of the blocks forming the platforms for the random generation system used to create the platforms of our levels. I had to respect strict metrics used by the system. Eventually I would make a first pass at a flat BG before polishing and building the different layers for the parallax system.
It was a big learning experience but I'm glad I was able to make it through and come out a little more skilled when it comes to enviro.
We just recolored the rocks of the starting world for the post apocalyptic and the jurassic biome so I didn't have to repaint new concept for the blocks.
The present
The future post apocalyptic world of the game. Had to match the exact location of the present's landmarks. (just without cacti)
The past's jurassic like mountains, before the forest and river dried up and formed the current cacti canyon. Allowed myself to be more liberal with the placements of mountains as I imagine erosion and land movement would have changed its topography.
The first biome I had to design, which also proved to be the hardest. I think what confused me most was that it was called the Crochet biome when we actually used a tricot pattern.
I looked a lot at Little Big Planet and Yoshi's Wooly World for ref.
Crystals are another fun thing to paint, especially when they are this colorful.
I started from the base drawn by another concept artist and built the crystal on top.
Just had fun rendering the jelly's transparency. The blocks were difficult though as we knew we couldn't afford the tech to have them semi-transparent. Opaque jelly is not the easiest to convey.
I had the most fun rendering this biome. The AO was fun to fake with the polygonal lasso.
My favorite biome to design, which was also my suggestion. I looove an Ancient Egyptian them and I thought making it a winter biome would make it goofy.
I think I was mostly happy about thinking up the stereo clouds. But in general hard surface and sci-fi themes are not my cup of tea.
Making tiny windows automatically makes it a city. Rinse, repeat and copy paste them everywhere!