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Background Bombshells
The backgrounds were a different story. It was easy enough to create a PNG image that would serve as the background, but the physics side of the process was generated in Autodesk Maya. The ball had to bounce off objects in the 3D world; then those objects would be replaced in the game by images of bushes, fountains, and the like. (Figures 7 and 8 show examples.) In theory, this seemed like a good way to work, but we had a bit of trouble getting things to match up. Whether this was due to the engine, the art, or the fact that I didn't have Maya and we had to share a build license between us, I'm not sure. As the art director, I should have been more proactive about trying to fix the problem. It didn't look bad—it just could have looked better.
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Figure 7 Gopher tiki level.
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Figure 8 Gopher alien level.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have pre-rendered out all the levels (see Figure 9), brought them into Photoshop, created a new layer for each, and drawn on top of them. That process would have taken far longer, but I think the results would have been worth the effort.
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Figure 9 Sample physics level.