At the start of our project, we tried our best to split up all the work as evenly as possible so I took an environment to design, which I decided to do the cave environment because I felt it was one I could do really well!
When I was brainstorming ideas for what I wanted it to look like, one of the first ideas that came to mind was something like ‘Terraria’s’ mushroom biome
The main thing I really liked about this was the use of one colour, as it really gives the biome a mystical feeling. At first I wanted to go for a blue palette as well but our forest environment was going to use a lot of blues and greens so i thought going for a purple and pink colour palette would give a nice vibrant contrast.
I also looked up some images of cave environments in games to see how they’re laid out, just to give me a better idea of what i was doing and I ended up referencing this image a lot for my own composition.
First I started off with this as a quick initial drawing.
I tried my hardest to think of all the assets that might be required for a cave environment, such as glow worms, mushrooms, stalactites, stalagmites, cave pillars, and roots, because later on, we had a group call and decided that the main hub of the world would be this giant tree that would allow the player to travel into each level, and this cave would be directly beneath it.
I don’t have much experience drawing backgrounds, so trying to draw one while adhering to the style we’d decided on was difficult, and it took me several attempts before I came up with an environment I liked. In total, I redid this drawing several times, taking into account Henry and Rachel’s feedback during our style guide presentation.
- Make the colours more faded in the background and darker in the foreground
- try more desaturated colours
Initially I had it so that the background got darker because I thought it made more sense in the context of a cave because less light would get in. I also thought having the light coming from the side would be a cool addition because it would give the player an idea of where to go to get out but this was scrapped because it didn’t really make sense.
This was my final rendition of the drawing, which I think improved upon the first one. 
I also think that this more detailed approach looks far better.
Something which proved extremely difficult was making tiles and assets for the game. I initially was trying to draw the tiles pixel by pixel instead of using a preset but eventually Henry came and showed me it was easier to just size presets to make the tiles. I ended up doing a lot of tiles until I found ones that I thought looked nice.
this was my first attempt at making game tiles, originally before taking on Henry’s feedback.
These were my second attempt at tiles; I and katy were having a very difficult time making them but katy had a great idea of leaving the edges of the tiles blank so that they can just be slotted in beside any tile without having to worry about them not overlapping correctly.
At this point I was still struggling with finding the right shades of purple to go for with my tiles but after speaking with Rachel and she suggested i go with a more desaturated palette, I tried again and ended up getting tiles I was happy with.
These are the final tiles I made for the game; I think the more desaturated look is much better. I created a few blank tiles with different rocky shapes in them so that way the level designer could use them to make the rock clusters look unique and not too samey.
I think the tiles look really good in game and it was great to see the level I was designing start to come together.
Making the assets for the cave was much easier than making the tiles, and I had a lot of fun doing so, but I did have a few attempts at it, mostly experimenting with colours and textures.
I used a spray paint brush on procreate (where ive done all my drawing and animating) to add a darker effect to the ends of stalagmites and stalactites, which I thought looked great. I also got some inspiration from Katy’s assets, which used small dots and lines to add detail.
A video with my assets in the environment.
Aside from the assets ive done for the cave, I’ve done a few others, such as an ‘effigy’, which are used for checkpoints in the game.
Again I used the spray paint brushes for adding more detail and using layers to give added detail. Our level designer Darragh made a design document I referenced a lot when making this effigy
Because our game is story-driven and has a theme of corruption and loss, I decided to include candles to demonstrate how people used to tend to the effigies while also adding more life to the world.
I also created two types of projectiles for the boss battle against the crow. I made two types of projectiles: sharp feathers that the crow will shoot out and a sound projectile that the player must avoid when the crow screeches before taking off and attacking the player in a swoop.
I made three different sizes of each so that the scripter could design different phases of the attack. I made the feathers smaller so the player could easily avoid and jump over them, and I made the sound waves flat for the same reasons.