Crown of Creation, The Struggle-Tile!

Hello!

This week, I’ve been working on the background tile for our game. It will be the base for the entire game, so the most important part was to make it connect well when looped.

I’d never done this before, so it was a bit of a challenge, and I had to repeat progress quite often since I had trouble implementing it. I wished for there to be a tile add-on to Photoshop, but alas! I had to do it myself. An exciting challenge.

One of the first things I had to do was to remove irregularities. There were some of the crystals that had a much richer blue color compared to the other ones. When looping this, a pattern was created that was so out of place that the tile looked cheap.

I began with sampling this asset that had been created by another artist from our group, and looped it several times with it’s unedited, rough edges to get a sense of if my sample would work or if it would create some odd pattern. I deemed this tile to be too repetitive, and made a tile with four versions of the original sample all rotated to a different angle than the other. This tile is shown in the next picture.

Looping this new tile looked much better, and me and my team decided that it looked good when looped. I then went forward making it loop smoothly.

I did this by having one tile centered, and looping it once at the top, and once at it’s side. On a separate layer, I started to paint how I wanted it to look when looped. When I was happy with how it looked, I cut out the parts that I’d painted on the non-centered tiles, and put in in the same spot but on the centered tile.

This is the finished product, and it was going to be used as a main color background beneath a gradient lighting layer. Although it’s definitely not perfect, I’m still satisfied with my work, since it’s my first time doing a loop from these kinds of disproportionate edges! 🙂

If I were to add something to the tile to make it better, I would add more nuances to the crystal. Right now they are very flat, and the only way you could know they’re crystals is from recognizing the shapes as crystals. But the sampled asset I used for this tile is used frequently throughout the game, so I don’t think it’ll be an issue to the player.

The sad thing is that we’re not going to use it in the game unfortunately, which is a bit disappointing since I put so much effort to it, but I know that the background we’ll use in the game will look ten times more awesome!