I see a possible solution to the background problem as follows.
First, you need to make several layers. The bottom most one will have the least detail and be more uniform.
The next layer will be the detail layer. For example, if we make an ocean biome, then the bottom layer is something dark blue, and the layer with details is all kinds of small objects, other organisms that just behave like a picture.
The third layer is playing layer. The player’s bacterium floats there, the game itself takes place there. Motion ripples can be made similar to how it was implemented in the game Spore. There’s a pretty simple special effect in the form of a wave. Also we can make bubbles here.
I will create a new scene and will do all sorts of developments there. Smaller results will be posted on Discord, larger ones can be posted here. Or any other convenient place.
I created a new thread for the microbe background rework as it seems the graphics workflow thread was really about a different topic.
@Deus had a description about what could be done to make the backgrounds different(ly) here: Graphics Tasks/Work-Flow Discussion (the last part of the first post).
Apologies for the delayed response; I’ve been tremendously busy the past month or so!
A lot of what I said on the original post linked above by hh are pretty much relevant here. I guess the “ideal” several members in our community point to is concept art from Uniow that was made like three years ago.
I think the footage that @kochiko shared on Discord a bit ago is pretty much approaching this vision. I will say one important thing to note is that we need to emphasize the fact that the scene is immensely microscopic, so we would probably want very “soft” and large instances of light more than we would want individual ripples and currents (water at the microscopic scale acts a bit more like a slush than liquid, which is why some bacteria appear to move so janky in videos).
Other than that, I think these backgrounds will be improved upon as we see more and are able to react to individual tweaks and progress. It’s good that we have a thread to track our discussions related to a graphics topic rather than just relying on Discord.
