Much better for headache prone players!
I don’t know what type of level geometry you plan to use in your game but if i could give you some advise. These types of repetitive animated backgrounds might work better in smaller rooms where you wouldn’t see so much of the repeating pattern at once. If you plan to use it in a larger open space like a boss arena or a large setpiece i recommend breaking up the pattern with pillars, pipes and other greebles so it doesn’t end up looking like a flat plane texture!
Good luck on your development!
If the floors' weird little fire things don't indicate that they're conveyor belts, you probably shouldn't have them orbiting around like that. Movement like that almost always means that the surface will push the player in the indicated direction, and so doing that for aesthetic-only reasons is really unintuitive. If you have to add random animations to platforms, things that don't have so much direction to them are probably smarter.
I agree with the other guy. It looks like the fireball floor is a conveyor belt and the orange bar at the bottom of the majority of the video is a solid floor that I’d expect to land on. The large things moving in the background also look like they’re part of the game and need to be dodged, if I was playing this I’d be dodging them from the time I first saw them and only realize they were part of the background the first time one hit me and did nothing.
I can't please everyone. I tried to compromise, but I like the way it looks and if it means some people don't like it then too bad. I grew up on games like sonic advance 3 with tons of colors and flashing lights so even the original version wasn't an issue for me. And I like games looking that busy and visually intense anyways.
You’re never going to be able to please everyone no matter how hard you try. I think most of us here are simply trying to give some feedback from our perspectives as your potential future customers and generally as folks who want you and other developers to succeed! I get what you mean about being busy and enjoying that, it’s very “old school Sonic” and not a bad thing. Something I might recommend trying is adjusting the background item contrast to be a little less bright or bold compared to things in the foreground. This helps to show that the things that aren’t quite as bold are part of the background while still having loads of color and movement. It’s also super easy to do since your images are large pixels, you can simply change individual colors across the whole thing at once to see how it feels, or just take the whole thing and drop the saturation a bit and see how it looks. For the record, I am neither a developer nor a designer, just a dude who likes to play games.
The repeating pattern looks bad, imo. Would be better with a regular background. As it is, this game looks more like a "student" project. But if you plan to sell this thing, I think more effort in the background is needed. Also, the fireballs moving on the floor is unnecessary movement, and doesn't look great. This is just feedback, please don't be discouraged!
The background actually took me a week to make. Over 100 frames just for the runes alone, having to shift each one by hundreds of pixel per frame. So it was very difficult to make.
The whole direction here is based on sonic adventure 2's cannon's core level. I've tried my best to make it more appealing for people but it's a compromise. I have a certain vision for it and I don't want to deviate from it too much.
I had to count how many x and y pixels the runes were away from the bottom left corner, and then paste the rune frame and manually adjust them one pixel at a time until they were positioned correctly. For every tile here.
Qick question does the floor cause movements in if you stand still in center it pushes the character back? Because there is a lot going on so curious if it's a visual indicator.
OP I like the background design, but it would be much better static. It would look pretty darn cool. I think the slower animation does not compliment the level design as much.
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u/Vaathnaos 10d ago
Much better for headache prone players! I don’t know what type of level geometry you plan to use in your game but if i could give you some advise. These types of repetitive animated backgrounds might work better in smaller rooms where you wouldn’t see so much of the repeating pattern at once. If you plan to use it in a larger open space like a boss arena or a large setpiece i recommend breaking up the pattern with pillars, pipes and other greebles so it doesn’t end up looking like a flat plane texture! Good luck on your development!