grass: a magical history

In the interviews that I've done over the past few weeks I've talked a bit about the evolution of my art during the making of Eduardo, so that will be the main topic of this blog for the time being.

First I should give a quick recap of the history of Eduardo. There have been three versions prior to this WiiWare game. In 2004 we started work on Eduardo the Magical Toaster, and started over again sometime early 2005, I believe, with Eduardo the Samurai Toaster. And pardon me if I get my dates wrong(the past five years of development have turned into a big blur) but I believe it was in 2006 when we started on yet another version of the game, this time using the Torque 2D engine.

I had no idea what I was doing when we first started. I had this idea for a grass field with cacti all over the place, and so I went about making grass tiles.

This was the reference photo I started out with:



Eduardo is a sidescroller so how does grass look from a side perspective? This was the only logical answer I could think of. Makes sense, right?

Here's what I came up with:


That's the result of days of hard work, folks. I don't know when it was that I realized how ridiculous that looked, but it was then that I started looking at how other games handled tiles.

So I took a note from the All-Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 3.

See those wavy lines the tiles are made up of? SMB3 uses a lot similar patterns. So I went pretty wild with the stylization this time.


Baby steps.

This time I went to Yoshi's Island for guidance.


And I recreated a tileset from YI, one pixel at a time and combined that with the SMB3 wavy tiles.


Now that doesn't look too bad. But that's because it was a duplicate of the wonderful art in Yoshi's Island. That's how the final tileset looked in Eduardo the Magical Toaster. After we decided to start all over again with a much better engine, I tried experimenting some more.

Baby steps.

(click on image for full size)

One step forward in terms of thinking outside the box, ten steps back in terms of aesthetic design. And I was going back to my first instincts of creating something approaching reality. Horrible bright neon green reality.

Using the paint program project dogwaffle, I began making simple textures using some basic paint brushes.

(click on image for full size)

I was finally starting to think a bit more abstract. But the texture was too flat, so I tried it again.

(click on image for full size)

The tile you see right above is still a part of the grass tiles in the final game, believe it or not.

I did away with the sharp grass edges and went for a crazy fake bloom effect, a phase I had to endure for a decent amount of time.

(click on image for full size)

At least I toned down the neon thing eventually.





I forgot when we started again with the Torque engine, but still not satisfied with my grass I continued experimenting. And I finally started using traditional media.

(click on image for full size)

(above: A simple pallete knife spread using acrylic paints)
(below: A simple acrylic wash applied with brushes)

I combined these two textures with the dogwaffle one posted above, and from that, and after years of tweaking, I settled on what you see in the final version of the game:

(Above: a cut-out from the texture we use for the grass)

And remember that I'm having to deal with a small file size limit so the texture has to work being repeated all throughout the level.

(click on image for full size)

And that's all for today.

-Daniel

Next time on the blog: I show something more interesting maybe? Let me know if this blog post bored you to near death or not.