Plague Run needs four zones that each look nothing like the others: a flooded sewer, a deserted neighbourhood at night, an open highway at sunset, and a laboratory with the lights still on. For a team our size, that is a lot of environment art.
The toolkit came first
So we built a small compositing toolkit before we built any of it. Backdrops are assembled in code from layers, which means a zone’s palette is a parameter rather than a repaint, and a change to the lighting model updates every scene that uses it.
That is not a substitute for art direction — somebody still decides that the sewers are green, brown and rusty orange, and that the laboratory is white, blue, silver and a neon green that should make you uncomfortable. It is a substitute for redrawing.
Exported in tiers, not flattened
Every backdrop exports as separate parallax tiers rather than one flat image. The city moves at several speeds as the rat runs through it, which is most of what sells the 2.5D depth on a phone screen where you cannot lean on resolution.
What is still ahead
The zones in the design document are the sewers, the city streets, the outskirts and the laboratory. Earlier concept work was built to a different set of stage names, so a re-skin is on the list before any of it is final. We will show it here when it is worth showing.