Background Design: Future Alleyway

Is it a blast from from the past or a visit to the future? Either way, a little over a year ago we posted about our work on the Tier Drop! animated teaser. I was put in charge of painting the backgrounds for this production, so I thought I'd share some of my work.

First up, is the "Future Alleyway!" Seeing as our main character really only travels "two days" into the future, I just needed to reference some current alleys. ;) So I went with your standard dirty alley, which I found to be humorous since we expect the future, even if only two days into it, to be better, brighter and more wonderful.



Next up are my layout lines, which I drew in Flash and filled with blocks of flat color. We sometimes do this to choose our colors, then we'll take this into Photoshop and paint the shadows and highlights, etc.



Last but not least, here is Mark's original animatic sketch. As you can see, he laid out the very basic shot and I had to actually define and embellish all the background details.



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Background Design: Sifaka User Homes

We all need shelter; it's a rule of nature. We human's have homes, animals have habitats, and in Sifaka World you can get the best of both with user homes for your animal avatars!

Our user homes started with the idea of a basic hut, with a wood floor and straw roof, that players could customize to their own liking with various furniture items. Below is my initial sketch of the empty hut.



As you can see, the inside of the user home got enlarged from the initial sketch to the color mock (below). We needed to make sure these huts had ample space inside for players to decorate and move their avatar around.



Below is the final base hut built in Flash. Now we’re ready to start decorating…



Players can earn points to buy furniture and other fun objects for their homes by playing the various games on the site. Another exciting option of these homes is you can even invite your friends over. Just think how jealous they'll be when they see your big screen TV! Below are a few screen shots of how we decorated our user home. In the second image you can even see the grid we had to adhere to when designing the user home and furniture items for game play.




Decorating and furniture buying is a fun thing to do -- at least until you see the price tag! I'm still saving up to get a hot tube in my own user home. ;)

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