Hey there! Sim here. I work on the art of Rift Riff. Thanks for following and wishlisting! It's really motivating and helps us spend more time on the game :) I want to use this place to share some short, things-in-development-right-now, stuff. But before I do that, I think it'd be cool to give some quick background from the first 100 days of art creation. 1 to catch you up to speed, and 2 because my brain can't handle starting somewhere in the middle :D Here's a summary of how we created the biomes you see in the screen shots. Let's go! First I sketched the things I knew for certain were going to populate the worlds: enemies, towers, main character.
Then I put them on an isometric grid (the perspective of all Rift Riff worlds) to quickly find out it was... boring.
It needed some objects with more height, like rocks and hills, which brought more atmosphere.
So I started a sketch in pixels, instead of the line art Id previously made.
Turned that into some game assets.
Placed it in the level Adriaan created for testing.
And added shadows and improved the colors further. This was a nice start off point to make more.
So I took the same process and applied it to other environment concepts.
And voila, that's how our first few biomes came to be :)