Technical Post - Wellington Real Life vs In-Game

Hello lovely patrons! It's me, adi again!

I was thinking for a looong time what to do this month for a technical post, and here you have me, writing one quite last minute!!! It's been a hectic month for me. I'm a job-haver now, as of late March, so I've been trying to adjust to that while keeping up with game dev. After having a chat with my lovely Elan friends, I've decided to do a highlight post on the backgrounds and how they compare to real life!

So as you all may know, PBH is set in a 'Wellington just a little different to our own'. That's right, in Fantasy Wellington, we have Fantasy Beings! Actually, all of the Earth continents are on floating islands and underneath lies the underworld where the magical beings originate from and have complete societies under. We never really get deep into it within PBH itself, but I do think about these things sometimes!

I believe one of the more iconic sights of Wellington is of course, the view from Mount Victoria! The inverse rounded bay is a fun sight, and walking along the waterfront is so much fun.

This is the only photo-filtered background, in fact! I took a photo at evening time (I went to watch the sunset) at Mt Vic, and I used a ton of effects and filters to get a base for the background. I've over painted a ton, but the detailing on the city would've taken me forever from scratch!

"Oh?", you may ask. "The waterfront?" That's right! I love water. And Wellington Central is never far from it! I wanted to make sure we had a background for the waterfront. There's a lot of different places I could've chosen from, but I decided on this little bridge that was quite memorable for the little circle... things. They glow at night. Far off in the distance you can see Te Papa, our national treasure of a museum, and a beautiful look at the ocean.

Te Papa as a background is still under progress, but I'll be sure to share it with everyone when it's done!

Moving along the waterfront, we reach one of Wellington's beaches (and also the most expensive suburb in Wellington as of 2021) - Oriental Bay! It feels quite different without the people, huh! I always love a little beach in my games and the sound of water crashing against the shores, and I was excited to add this one to the game.

And of course, I think it's impossible to talk about Wellington iconic sights without talking about the Bucket Fountain on Cuba Street. I think it's quite a regular sight for Wellingtonians, but it's really so much fun to see for the first time! It's been the protagonist of a couple of incidents, including one where a bucket was stolen and later returned, with a beautiful new paint job. If you google Bucket Fountain, you can read about them!

For an art installation one year, it was decked out in flowers and was absolutely wonderful. I like to add a little bit of green and colour to my PBH backgrounds, so I decided to give our little fountain the same treatment (as well as hanging up some flags!)

Moving onto something quite exciting... of course, the real Wellington doesn't have all the locations we have in the game! So we've taken to... y'know... convenient replacing a couple of buildings. Yeah? So here we have Aspen's workplace, the Bellhouse (😉) Cafe!

The interior! This is also where the key visual is set. The KV was completed before the background, actually, so I was working off the KV to draw this cafe! Theo helped me a lot with the various clutter and detail elements of this one. The railing in the back needs to be removed and whatnot - I did that bg above just recently, and changed some elements around - but it is mostly done!

Here's a little BG sneak peak as well! This sketch was done by the lovely revynix, who's been helping me out with sketches like these. This is Bolton Street Cemetery!

There's still quite a few backgrounds left to go for Please Be Happy - we want backgrounds for the Botanical Gardens, Te Papa, maybe even an exterior for Juliet's home - we'll do our best! But for now, I hope you all enjoyed my little... tour(?) of fantasy Wellington!

- adi