Sylvia chapter 4 in the making: Player’s Hospital Room

Before you get your hands on the newest build of Sylvia, as a lot of work is needed for it:
We thought that you might find it entertaining to take a peek behind the scenes, and learn more about the creation and development of the game. 

Today I, your hostess Marjaana will cover the latest addition to the game, a background for the main character’s hospital room.

As the second artist, I’m in charge of the visuals that are not the main characters or the base backgrounds; I colour beautiful line arts, deliver you smooth animations and whisk up secondary characters.
I even dabble in dialogue and help out with casting. Indeed I  am involved in all major decisions for the studio, and this week it has been my pleasure to tackle the next scene in Sylvia – the player’s hospital room. 

Sylvia office Chapter 1 comparison 

The backgrounds that you see in Sylvia are custom tailored backgrounds created from an outsourced 3D generated base. 

In their basic form, they are rarely a good fit in the game, and must be tinkered with in order to be accepted. At the very least, this includes lighting and filter fixes, but most often other objects and animations are added in or removed. Sometimes the situation calls for an entirely new background to be created from scratch. 

Player hospital room (Chapter 3)

In chapter 4 we will see the hospital room from  the player’s point of view. As he wakes, the girls will greet the player by his bedside, so a background from this angle was needed. It was decided that the window side of the room should be re-created for this scene. 

The new background should blend in seamlessly, even though no 3D modelling software was to be used. 

Player’s hospital room draft 1

The angle of the player’s viewpoint, lying in his bead, is such that he is looking at the girls from a slightly upward angle. The sprites, however, are all head-on, so some compromises and creative perspective magic were called to the rescue to achieve a satisfying result.

I tried several angles to fit the scene at this point, but remained unsatisfied for quite some time. Whether that was due to high expectations or being clinically perspective-disabled, I can’t begin to guess. 

Player’s hospital room draft 3

I finally arrived to a satisfying conclusion that bent the truth just enough to allow the girls to stand comfortably by the player’s bed. I use lines to aid with my non-existent depth perception and to create realistic edges for furniture. 

It is easy to lose your place and get lost in the jungle of angles and lines and planes. A perspective grid is much like the sun: Don’t stare at it for too long or you will go blind. 

The new background has to look like it belongs with the existing backgrounds. I was very lucky to have the have original background to refer to: At this point in the game, the players will have familiarized themselves with the scene, so linking the new scene with the old won’t be too difficult, given that I won’t do too terrible of a job. 

To get as close of a match as possible, I prefer to use modified objects from previous backgrounds to create a new scene. Because of the unforgiving angle and the scarcity of furniture, this was not possible and I had to be extra, extra careful to match the colour and the texture of all of the items. 

To create an aesthetically pleasing composition, I was already taking many liberties with the scale of the objects (such as the height of the windows), and if I were to bend the reality too much, the scene would break. 

Player’s hospital room scenery comparison

Once the foreground had been completed, I worked on the view from the windows that would go on a separate layer to enable future animations and scene changes. 

The windows in the original background are completely blank, but because windows make up the majority of the image in the new background, leaving them blank would look sloppy and uninteresting. I add trees and clouds that are consistent with the previous scenes that we have used and keep them in the same style.

The clouds shift away at dusk and dawn, and if you squint, you can see faint stars in the night sky. 

Player’s hospital room finished scene 

Last addition to the scene is the bedframe overlay. This is the first overlay that we have used in backgrounds so far, but it’s necessary to convey that the main character is currently the character of focus.  

During normal dialogue the main character is never shown, and since he is not voiced yet, other cues are needed to convey which character the player is in control of, especially considering that previous to this scene we have just inhabited the silky skin of Sylvia. 

Player’s hospital room time comparison 

The final step in the process is to create appropriate lighting versions for the scene – day, dusk and night. 

Colour, lighting and vignette modifiers are added to fit each scene. When all elements of the scene are layered together in the appropriate order like a ham sandwich, the scenery, the background and the overlay form a flexible new addition to the old backgrounds!

Thank you for reading,
Until next time! 

Marjaana