The Cricket 26 Background
The Cricket 26 Background
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I absolutely adore the background in Cricket 26 - and that's mostly because we couldn't decide on a colour, so we picked ALL the colours. It's affectionately referred to in the studio as Rainbow Road and is honestly one of my favourite things I've worked on in my time at Big Ant. With sports games, there's such a heavy emphasis on realism and accuracy to the broadcast, so having the freedom to do something as cool as a rainbow background was super freeing.
I recommend reading my page on the Rugby League 26 background before this! I used a lot of my knowledge from League's background to get Cricket's exactly how I wanted it.
The buttons being rainbow were super exciting to me when I saw the mockups, but the background was still in the air at that stage. We had some shapes and a vibe we wanted, but matching the colours of the background to the buttons and the scrolling idle animation came later - and when it did, I was SO excited. This meant I was linking up buttons, their colours and their resources to something in the game's code, rather than just my XAML Workspace. The designers did such an amazing job with this design and I am so grateful I was able to bring it to life.
If you want to learn more about the buttons, I have a page for that!
Take a look at the background without the banner, because that looks sick too:
This is the main state of the background throughout most of the game, but there is a dimmer, a floor collapse like Rugby League 26's, and also a fun new layout with the same sort of vibe for the play now flow. The floor collapse works exactly the same as Rugby's with its invisible rectangle that I was converting the height of into a ratio value - there somehow was no better solution for that. It worked a treat!
Rugby's invisible colour-dummy rectangles became a staple in my work as well. Why animate multiple elements when you can just animate one, invisible rectangle and tell everything else to follow the colour of that? With such a colourful background like Cricket 26's, this was a lifesaver and I'm sure I will continue using this trick forever.
Remember, just a paragraph ago, when I talked about the fun play-now flow background? Here it is!
This fade out wouldn't have been possible without my programmer friends who figured out a nice way to crossfade between views. This is now used everywhere in our later projects - thanks guys!
This also has the smooth colour transitions between team colours, but that doesn't feel so impressive now that I've done all the colours of the rainbow throughout the entire menu system... Guess I have to step up my game.
Well, speaking of stepping up my game - I was pretty happy with this stadium select menu. That crossfade was really scary to get my head around, as it involved one of my first trips into loading and disposing of textures in C++. Since we didn't have the crossfade before, only one stadium image was being loaded at a time, but with a crossfade, you need two, and assign them "new" and "old" labels. It seems really simple now, but it was a big step forward into "yeah, no problem, I can do that" territory for me.
I'm a big fan of little wins, and that's okay!
About Cricket 26
About Cricket 26
"Cricket 26 - The Official Game of the Ashes"
"Featuring the all-new Management Career, a bigger and better Pro Team, in-depth Ashes mode, and expanded control on and off the field from enhanced gameplay and in-depth strategies - Cricket 26 is The Ultimate Showdown."
Working at Big Ant Cricket 26 has been one of my favourite experiences so far, because the menus in this game are just so FUN! I learned so much on this project and was able to dip my toes into the implementation side of things a little more.
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