Backgrounds for the green Light

This week in class we discussed the requirements that we absolutely need to meet in order to get the green light to start "production" of Crisis of the super verse. One of the main things that we need is to make the game feel like the player is fighting inside a cosmic book, a way in which we want to give the players such feeling is to switch from 3D rendered backgrounds to 2D images with parallaxing effects to simulate depth.
The challenge with this is that out main producer wants us to be able to show at least 3 different art directions in which Environments could be portrayed as 2D.

Personally as an artist I am big into detail, but for the purpose of this game I have to stray away from that because the environments are an asset which we will use to create the feeling of being in a comic book but we don't want them to steal the show from the super-powered action going on within them. For this reason we have decided to take a more simplistic approach. Looking through some TV shows and references of what has work for shows and games before we stumbled upon a classic, Samurai Jack. We enjoyed the simplistic look of the environments because they didn't detract from the characters.

What i really enjoyed from the backgrounds is the black simple shapes that clearly represent buildings. From a comic book perspective these black shapes fit perfectly in my vision for the backgrounds because most comics have that similar look with hard black shadows which i think players will relate to.

 The idea behind these backgrounds is that they will be split into different layers and they will move at different speeds (parallax) to simulate depth. These are just concepts pieces however if we decide to go with this art style then i will add more variation in the buildings for the foreground and the background as well as more lights which will add more atmosphere to this metropolis that we are trying to portray.

Other ideas for different art styles we want to try out are along the lines of the Venture Brothers which use many more colors but they still keep simple shapes and use different blending techniques to make their buildings and props look simple yet easy to read.

Also another art style that i am very excited to try out is along the lines of Spectacular Spider Man, this art style uses simple shapes yet differentiates the buildings by using different colors fort he brick and the windows.

Again the idea is that the backgrounds provide a sense of atmosphere without distracting the player from the action.