We've been working hard on many of the features in Astral lately, so it's difficult to decide what to show you guys. And most of the stuff is still very much a work in progress, but the landscape and environment is starting to take shape and we wanted to share it with you!
The programmers implemented a system for parallaxing in Astral a while ago, making it easy for the artists to configure as well. This turned out to be a really effective way to work on the background. The artists can create the assets for the background and assign them to their respective layers as they see fit. Meaning that we don't have to wait for the programmers to implement the new assets into the game(saving a lot of time on both sides).
When adding a new asset to the background, we have a number of parameters that we can tweak to make sure it fits just the way we intended. Each layer can have as many different images rendered on it as we want, so that we can create variety in the landscape. Also we have to adjust size and a variable that decides how often that specific layer will render its assets, since it's random we have a specific range that we specify.
We plan to have different background assets for each biome on the planet, so that the biomes visually stretch outwards across the landscape. The videos in this post show how it looks like right now, we have a few assets for the background, but we plan to have more soon as the landscape is lacking in variety as it is now. But we hope it's enough to give you a feeling of how the parallaxing and landscapes will feel in Astral!
Edvin Avdagic - Art Director
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<3 Great stuff.