All You Need to Know About Video Game Background Design

A video game background design shapes gameplay, storytelling, immersion, and mood, getting game players immersed within the game world. When designed ingeniously, it elevates immersion, engagement, satisfaction, and revenue of a game. This blog covers everything you need to know, from types of game background design to techniques, pro tips, examples, challenges, and solutions.

An immersive video game background is what gets a “Skyrim” player to spend hours just staring at waterfalls and makes “Dark Souls” feel oppressively bleak with crumbling castles. Game backgrounds are silent storytellers that define the game’s mood and guide players emotionally and spatially for an exceptional gaming experience.

Video game background design involves crafting the visual environment in a game where gameplay takes place. The very design is more than just aesthetics that extends to smooth storytelling, player guidance, and elevated immersion. The key aspects of background design include texture details, color palettes, and spatial depth for a believable and engaging world.

An appealing background makes a game highly engaging and successful; however, for this, you need to know everything about it and hire a game developer to implement those ideas. Browse through this blog, which navigates you through a comprehensive analysis of video game background design, its role, types, functions, examples, challenges, and solutions, enabling you to have a hassle-free game design experience.

What Is Video Game Background?

Video game background is a part of game environment design that refers to those visual elements that create the setting and environment wherein the game action occurs. A game’s background is more than just the scenery that creates the game environment, but plays a significant role in storytelling. It enhanced the gameplay by setting the mood and conveying the information about the game world.

The video game background design may vary, ranging from just simple 2D illustrations to complex 3D environments, immersing players in the gaming environment for an extraordinary gaming experience. 

Role of Video Game Background Design

A strong background design does more than just decorate a game. It shapes how players feel, think, and move through the game world. From setting the mood to guiding gameplay, it’s an unsung hero of great game design. See the pointers below to know the role of video game background design in game development: 

• Sets the Mood and Theme: Video game backgrounds instantly tell players where they are, whether it’s a dystopian wasteland, a lush forest, or a cyberpunk city. They frame the emotional and visual tone of every scene.
• Guides Player Movement: Environmental elements in game backgrounds like lighting, landmarks, and visual cues help players navigate without always needing UI hints.
• Builds Immersion and Believability: Thoughtful background design adds realism and depth. When every rock, wall, or skyline feels intentional, players feel more grounded in the experience.
• Narrates Stories Without Words: Details like worn-out posters, broken statues, or overgrown ruins can hint at a world’s history with no cutscene required.
• Creates Brand Identity: Iconic environments, such as Hyrule, Rapture, or Midgar, become symbols of the game itself. A distinctive style helps games stand out and stick in memory.

Types of Video Game Background and Their Functions

For those who question how I should approach creating the background of my video game, first, they need to understand the types and functions of a video game background. The following are the types of video game backgrounds and their functions you should know:

1. Static Background

These are non-moving backgrounds, like a digital wallpaper. You often see in classic platformers or visual novels where the scene sets the mood, but doesn’t change. It’s simple, yet effective when done right.

2. Dynamic Background

When we say dynamic background, we are talking about motion like clouds drifting, lights flickering, or the day turning to night as you play the game. Dynamic background makes the game world feel alive and evolving, reacting subtly to time, events, or your movement.

3. 2D Background

Flat, stylish, and often artistic, 2D video game backgrounds rely on illustration and layering to create depth in the game. Whether it’s pixel art or hand-painted scenery, these backgrounds have a timeless charm and are common in indie games and side-scrollers.

4. 3D Background

3D video game backgrounds put you inside the environment, full 3D worlds you can roam. Right from massive open-world landscapes to detailed cityscapes, 3D backgrounds are highly immersive and interactive, giving players the freedom to explore every angle.

5. Functional Background

Functional backgrounds do more than look good in a game. Platforms, doorways, and paths blend into the scenery but serve as cues or obstacles in the gameplay. A cracked wall might hint at a secret passage, making the gameplay immersive and interesting.

6. Parallax Scrolling Backgrounds

In parallax scrolling backgrounds, multiple layers move at different speeds as you move, creating a cool 3D effect in 2D games. It tricks your eyes into feeling depth, making game environments feel richer and more dynamic without needing full 3D.

7. Procedural Background

These backgrounds aren’t handcrafted but generated on the fly. Game designers use algorithms to create endless variations of landscapes or skies, so no two players get the same view. Procedural backgrounds are great for games focused on exploration and randomness.

8. Hand-Crafted Background

Hand-crafted backgrounds refer to those backgrounds embedded with elements, designed by an artist. In the very background design, every leaf, rock, or star is placed with intention. These backgrounds carry a personal, thoughtful touch and often reflect the tone and soul of the entire game.

Popular Game Background Design Styles & Techniques

In addition to types and functions, backgrounds can vary greatly in artistic direction. Below are some widely used styles and techniques you should know:

1. Game Background Design with Skybox

As the name suggests, Skybox is a large cube or sphere textured with panoramic visuals, such as skies, stars, and mountains, to simulate a huge environment surrounding the player. Although it is used primarily to create skies, game developers also employ Skybox to create oceans, add depth to a chasm, or create the illusion of outer space. With Skybox, one can create the complete background of a game or even a few parts of it.

Example: Halo and Minecraft utilize skyboxes to create the illusion of their infinite skies and distant horizons.

When to Use: You can opt for using Skybox when you wish to create immersive, 360-degree 3D game environments without the will to afford the performance cost of rendering distant geometry.

2. Game Background Design with Patterns

Pattern-based video game backgrounds repeat design motifs, such as tiles, symbols, or stylized textures, to build rhythm or theme. These patterns include simple graphics, conceptual images, or even silhouettes of the game’s objects. To design these patterns, game designers tap into the game environment and use the shape of the objects that are iconic and hold special meaning in a specific game.

Example: Angry Birds 2 employs a pattern as a background to create the game’s aesthetic UI. Apart from that, Hades and Dead Cells make use of decorative and repetitive patterns to reinforce aesthetic identity in their environments.

When to Use: Go with game background design with patterns when you want visual consistency or thematic repetition, particularly in 2D or roguelike games.

3. Environmental Game Background Design

This background design involves creating cities, nature, weather effects, ruins, and lighting to ground the game in a believable and fantastical world. In 3D game development services, environmental design refers to creating non-functional objects, such as buildings, trees, lamp posts, or particles, for example, fog or haze. This video game background design is used in games specifically with urban and closed-off settings, open worlds, natural landscapes, fantasy realms, and more.

Here, you should bear the fact in mind that in game art design services, the environment, at times, plays a part in the game level, while other times, it may serve just an aesthetic purpose. In the “Bubble Witch Saga,” for example, the game environment, which is designed as the background, has no gameplay function; however, it adds aesthetic value to the game.

Example: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild employs environmental background design and creates a dynamic and expansive world with wildlife, weather, and evolving biomes.

When to Use: Environmental game background design is for those games relying heavily on exploration, storytelling, and immersion throughout the game setting.

4. Game Background Design with Gradient & Flat Colors

It’s the simplest video game background design, in which a single color or a gradient is used as the entire game background. Game developers use gradients or solid flat colors to create environments that are visually modern, appealing, and clean and that convey mood through color theory. While gradients, with their smooth color transitions, add depth and dimension, the flat colors offer a clean and modern game environment.

Example: Monument Valley and Alto’s Adventure employ gradients and flat palettes to create minimalist yet stunning video game backgrounds. “Rise Up” and “Color Switch” are also two examples of games using the same design pattern.

When to Use: Choose video game background design with gradient & flat colors if you want an emotional, stylized, or mobile-friendly aesthetic. Note that this type of background is commonly used for hyper-casual, minimalistic games and Indie game development.

Pro Tips to Create Astonishing Video Game Backgrounds

Creating astonishing video game backgrounds is no longer a big deal when you know how to choose a cohesive color palette, use light wisely to set the mood, enhance scenes with particle effects, and much more. Here’s a complete list of pro tips to create a world-class video game background:

1. Choose a Cohesive Color Palette

Use a color palette to set the tone and environment. You can use colors that match the game’s emotional and thematic goals and potentially have multiple beautiful backgrounds, each out of sync with the other. This way, you can make it feel like each background belongs to a different game, created by different artists.

2. Use Lighting to Set the Mood

You should know the importance of lighting in games and how it can work wonders and use it wisely. An apposite use of lighting establishes the emotional tone of a game. While dark, moody lighting can create a sense of tension or fear, the bright, soft lighting tends to evoke feelings of optimism and calmness.

3. Blur the Unnecessary Details

In case the background serves only aesthetic purposes, you should consider applying depth-of-field or background blur, or darken it to make it distinguishable from the game’s action. It helps gamers focus on key gameplay elements.

4. Bring Backgrounds to Life with Animation

Consider adding subtle animations like flickering lights, moving clouds, or swaying trees, as it could be good to ensure immersion. Apart from that, you can animate game elements like terrain, flowers, bushes, or clouds in environmental backgrounds. In case you’re utilizing pattern backgrounds, slowly moving them around could be the right way to go.

5. Implement Parallax Scrolling Layers

In top-down or side-scrolling games, using parallax can help you add a 3D effect to a 2D game. It creates a layered movement effect that embeds 2D games with an enriched sense of depth and dynamism. Parallax scrolling causes different layers of background to move at different paces. More distant layers move slower, adding a sense of distance, while the closer ones move faster.

6. Enhance Scenes with Particle Effects

Mix particles, such as rain, dust, leaves, sparks, and VFX, into the video game background to make it feel more responsive and alive. It’s excellent to use particles; however, you should keep the fact in mind that overusing them isn’t right, as they can get in the way of the game’s key graphics, putting a heavy load on processors.

7. Experiment with Hue Shifting

If you have a game background that is flat or gradient color, shifting its hue as much as needed, can be the right alternative to consider. You can alter the background hue based on different in-game states like day/night, fight, etc.

8. Vary Animation Speeds for Realism

Avoid animating everything at the same pace, as slow and fast elements add realism and rhythm. Varying speed in animation in a video game background enhances realism by mimicking natural movement and creating a sense of depth. You can do this by adjusting animation speed depending on distance from the camera (parallax scrolling) or by ensuring subtle variations to animation cycles.

Examples of Memorable Video Game Backgrounds

Memorable video game backgrounds stand out because of their unmatched visual style, immersive atmosphere, and ability to evoke specific emotions. Minecraft and Cyberpunk 2077 are a few names of the games with memorable backgrounds you should know for a crystal-clear understanding.

1. Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox video game that allows game players to explore a vast, block-based world, build structures, and craft items. The visual style of Minecraft is characterized by its blocky and voxel-based graphics, oftentimes with bright, colorful environments and landscapes. It enables game players to encounter a wider variety of biomes, such as deserts, forests, oceans, and mountains, each with its distinct look.

2. Cyberpunk 2077

This very game is the player’s first choice because of its aesthetic background. It narrates the story of V, a mercenary (individuals who provide combat skills, technical expertise, or other services for hire in exchange for payment) in Night City. The city is a sprawling, neon-lit metropolis, embellished with soaring skyscrapers, grungy back alleys, and crowded marketplaces. The video game has a dynamic 3D background, which is alive with detail, such as ads flashing, cars flying by, and sheer density, creating a sense of a living dystopia.

Common Background Design Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Common background design challenges include story integration, visual consistency, immersive experience, maintaining performance, and technical limitations. Here’s how to deal with these challenges and make the video game background design convenient and high-performance.

1. Story Integration

Video game backgrounds that feel disconnected from the narrative are more likely to break immersion.

Solution: Designing the background and the visual elements according to the story’s themes, lore, and character journey.

2. Visual Consistency

The mismatched art styles in a game background may confuse or distract game players.

Solution: Making use of unified art direction and shared design guidelines across all assets can be the right solution to ensure visual consistency.

3. Immersive Experience

When there are flat or generic backgrounds, they are more likely to limit player engagement.

Solution: Game developers should add depth with lighting, layers, and ambient animation that react to player presence.

4. Maintaining Performance

Highly detailed backgrounds in a video game can slow down gameplay.

Solution: Optimizing assets through LOD (Level of Detail) techniques and efficient rendering could be the way to maintain performance.

300Mind Creates Game Backgrounds That Pull Players In

An appealing and immersive background in a game has a larger role to play in its success, and we help you get there. 300Mind is a leading game development company providing complete video game development services to businesses across the world.

Be it game art design, 2D/3D game art design, game UI/UX design, or concept art design services, we allow you to hire game designers intensively vetted to meet your game design and development needs. We have developed games like Rage of Zion and Forbidden Islands, aesthetically enriched with appealing backgrounds, and can do it for yours too.

Our vetted developers can design high-performance and appealing games for players of different kinds. So, if you have a game development idea that you want to turn into reality backed with an aesthetically enriched background, contact us for complete assistance.

Frequently Asked Questions on Game Background Design

WRITTEN BY Pradeepsingh Rajpurohit

Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit is a 3D Artist with more than 5 years of experience in 2D & 3D gaming/console gaming/AR/VR gaming and design. Requirement understanding, assets creation, provides solutions in terms of visuals to make the game experience smooth and engaging.