The Evolution of Trees

When I started on the web game, I had envisioned trees as being something akin to a tile type.  By that, I mean the trees would be the same size as the tile they occupied.  Here is a screenshot from the web game to show a few types like maple, oak, pine and fir.

Early Trees from the Web Game

When I decided to abandon that project, I also abandoned the idea of everything in the game being limited to a single tile space.  This led me to searching for trees that were larger than a tile and more detailed.  I was surprised to find so many free basic tree images on the internet.  Some were a bit too simple and others were a bit too generic.  I wanted the player to be able to look at a tree and know what kind it was.  Unfortunately, tree images are so prolific on the web that you can find just about the same generic image labeled as a dozen types of trees, none of which are actually represented by the image.    Here are a few decent samples I was able to find.

Early Tree Sources

The trees didn't look bad, but they really didn't feel like the kind of trees I wanted in the Unity game.  Speaking of Unity, there are many great 3D tree assets on the Unity Store, but I am not building a 3D game.  I wanted flat 2D trees that would be pretty easy to identify or at least close enough to the actual species that the player would learn to recognize them.  Another idea I had was to have sprite sheets showing age variations for each tree type.  Here are the cherry and cedar tree sprite sheets.

The more savvy reader might recognize the cedar sprites.  They are from a popular free art asset package prolifically distributed on the web.  I merely resized them and touched up the colors.  I suppose I would have stayed with these sprite sheets were it not for my obsession to detail.  No, these were just not genuine enough for me.  I wanted trees that would stand out and provide a real sense of immersion.  I wanted the player to feel like they were surviving in a real forest.  Then the idea came to me.  What if I could use real tree images within a 2D pixel game?  The idea was just crazy enough for me to want to try it out.  I began looking around the web for free public tree pictures.  They didn't have to be standalone images.  They just had to be public domain and good enough to edit.  Fortunately, I found some excellent source images and proceeded to clean them up for use in the game.  The result was exactly what I was after.  Take a look at two of the trees found in Survive and Thrive.

The Pine and Aspen Trees

And here is an in-game screenshot of the Aspen after adding some additional shading.

Survive And Thrive
Standing Under the Aspen Tree

By using real images as a foundation, I hope to create a look and feel that is very much wilderness in the minds of the player, but still a fun 2D world.  Taking this path was certainly not the easiest.  I spent many hours on each tree, working each pixel cleaning them up and modifying areas that did not look like I wanted.  Some required more work than others.  I believe only one tree has survived in the game that wasn't taken from a real photo.  It was actually a vector image of the type of tree I was looking for.  To date, I have still not found a real image of that tree.  Perhaps I will not find it, but the vector tree serves the purpose for now.  Until next time.