About the graphics

Today I would like to tell you something about the graphic in Behind the Horizon. Since I am mainly a game designer and programmer I had to start from scratch in the graphical area and often had to rely on other generous artists who provide their textures and sprites as OpenArt. Therefore there are inevitably different graphic styles in my game, which is perceived as disturbing by some. But I have found that after a short time it doesn't matter anymore and in some "magical" way ;-) everything fits together again. It's the athmosphere that carries the game and the many possibilities and stories that Behind the Horizon is focused on. 

It was especially difficult to find animated sprites, which had to be available in many ariations (NPCs) for my game. The NPCs should be easily distinguishable and in the end I decided to use an OpenArt Online Sprite Generator and then manually enhance them and add animations if needed. This serves its purpose well. I would have liked to add more animals of the wilderness, like squirrels, foxes, wild cats etc... but unfortunately there was little choice and creating my own animations proved to be so time-consuming that it would have doubled the already giganitic time needed for the game. 

In the caves I decided to use the technique of ambient occlusion, because it's simply more exciting if you don't see everything immediately and turn around a corner and discover a surprise (good or bad) there. The corresponding part of the program was quite complicated, because it should be fast enough to handle many light sources and it is calculated on the CPU. With the third attempt it worked and I think it does its purpose and contributed a lot to the atmosphere in the dark caves.

The graphical interface is almost completely designed by myself and it is colored in earth tones matching the theme of the game. I tried to make it clear and not overload it with too much information. It was also important to me that the handling is fluent and comfortable and one does not spend too much time in the inventory or other elements of the interface.