This past several days, I’ve been engaged in polishing up the forest background. The forest background that shipped with 1.0 was unsatisfactory to me; many elements of it were barely better than sketches, and the far-distant portion of it was a boring monochrome. However, we shipped with it because it didn’t affect gameplay, only aesthetics, and we believe in RERO (release early, release often).
Here, you can see a side-by-side comparison. (Click to zoom in.)
Probably after our upcoming update, I am looking into doing some major additions to those interactible/standable trees, adding a much larger variety of branch elements, and if I have time, perhaps even adding some variants on the tree trunks (wider, thinner ones). I’m also planning to flesh out the foliage tiles a bit.
Yeah – my intent in giving the “distant brightness” was to make it more mysterious – as if something beyond the treeline is making that light, and you have to explore further to find out. Rather than it being a monochromatic soup.
That said, I’m working on some palette-shifts which should really give different atmospheres to different sections of the forest – some of which ought to be fairly dark and spooky. 😮