Beatland: Ninjapaw's Revenge | Adding Depth to Beatland’s World

One of the visual goals for Beatland: Ninjapaw’s Revenge is to keep the illustrated, hand-painted look of the original artwork while making the world feel spatially deeper.

The backgrounds started as a series of flat 2D layers. This already worked well for parallax, but once the camera started moving through the environment, some of the larger elements, especially the mountains and clouds, still felt noticeably flat.

So I started experimenting with turning those silhouettes into actual 3D geometry.

Keeping the original artwork

I didn’t want to recreate the mountains or clouds as traditional 3D assets. Their painted look is an important part of Beatland’s visual identity.

Instead, the idea was to use the original artwork as the surface of the 3D model.

For the mountains, I brought the original silhouette into Blender, created geometry that followed its overall shape, and added depth to the surface. The original image was then projected back onto the model as a texture.

From the front, it still looks very close to the original illustration. But when the camera moves, the geometry starts producing real changes in perspective and silhouette.

I also worked on the big cloud, and I could give it a little bit of depth, but not as much as I expected. Maybe I'll revisit the cloud later, but for the time being I'll focus my energy in making it playable as soon as I can.

Back into Unity

Once the models were ready, I exported them from Blender and brought them back into Unity, where they became part of the existing parallax environment.

I feel this update added more immersiveness to the environment.

The goal is not to make the world look traditionally 3D. In fact, I want to avoid that. The models only need enough volume for the camera movement and parallax to reveal additional depth while preserving the appearance of the original artwork.

There is still plenty to experiment with, and I have a few ideas for that, but for now this technique is starting to give me the layered, illustrated world I had in mind for Beatland: Ninjapaw’s Revenge.

More development updates soon.