Hi! Just a quick post to show of the backgrounds were made for the Clowntown demo.  Please remember to leave any kind of feedback if you played it, both positives, always appreciated for motivation, and negative ones, for improvement and deciding what's next, are welcomed.

Wanting to get a prototype out as quickly as possible (and also being quite bad at making backgrounds pixel art) I decided early on to use real life photos. The whole process was fun, stitching togheter photos of real life locations (all CC0) often very different one from another and trying to evoke at least a bit of cohesion. Working with pre-existing background clearly brings limitations to the whole design, but in the end also inspired some of the puzzles directly. So here I'm showing a source image and what came to be: the Salts Mill in Saltaire, Yorkshire becomes the outside of the main building of the demo.

Things like cars parked were removed to provide a little bif of abandoned feeling to the place (also needed to connect to the adjacent room, side of the building which was taken from a totally different place). The hole in the wall was a workaround to provide entrance to the library. Also lik how the littlest bits of animation can give life to a room (the sheet in the lower right corner).

Here, the puddle of water directly informed one of the game puzzles later.