Rolling Legend - episode1 Behind the scenes - Part I (backgrounds)

For me, Rolling Legend was, and still is, a huge job, my first real job as Game Artist and it took me a long time to figure out what to do and where to go... From the animations of the monsters in cartoon style, to the backgrounds literally built by pieces to be entrusted to the level designer to give them sense and logic!
Now I'd like to talk about the backgrounds. At the beginning it was difficult to understand the needs of a game, I was only taking care of aesthetics issues instead of technical matters... I was a disaster! But slowly I started to follow the right path!
At first it was a triumph of objects, monsters, props as you can see below

It is a mess isn't it? So much stuff here!
The Level Designer was shocked thinking about the amount of memory needed to handle all this lol!
Definitely not good...


I drew hundreds of objects, assets and props, at first separate to give freedom to my friends, but freedom often means waste of time.
So I started to search for the balance between practicality and big special effects (joking) and my motto has become: "a few items, and great effect"

Since I love to madness architecture and the great depth, I am convinced that the central perspective and symmetry were the best solution, to create decent effects of fake 3D, though with very basic shapes. 

The result is "easy and quick"

Someone told us that Rolling Legend is more like a console game (and we are planning to prepare some surprises on this topic) and that we aimed too far up, but whatever you think I really hope you'll enjoy its graphics!
It is more than an experiment, and we're improving controls and the performance to grant a more enjoyable game experience.

So stay tuned and follow us to have news about Johnny Marble and his friends!

Rolling Legend - episode1 Behind the scenes - Part I (backgrounds)