How to manage assets for large 2D landscapes

Unity Engine
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Hello! Working on 2D game and am intending to use a more hand-drawn/non-generated art style. However I’m coming to an issue where I feel like I either need ridiculously large asset files or hundreds of small assets. A few ideas I had were the classic “Make and reuse 5 assets in creative ways”, but I was curious at what other methods people have found to handle landscaping.

This is basically my ideal (not that I’m expecting to get anywhere this level of quality density).
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Actually, now that I think of it. I should play this game some where and see what it’s doing…

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Without repeating stuff it’s pretty hard to save memory. You could look at texture compression. Also the resolution of these games probably is not like ‘HD’ but maybe 1024x768 sort of. With higher quality art you can sort of get away with lower pixel resolution. But note also that in games like this (Rayman), they are very modern engines where the meshes/geometry that the textures map onto are able to ‘distort’ the textures, which can create variety without making it look bad. So like the ground there, may look really unique but maybe it’s a repeating texture or layers of textures that are dynamically warped to fit some geometry, making them seem like they are custom. Rayman for sure does vertex animation, of which this is an extension. i.e. like objects with bones where the vertices of the mesh distort but the texture image is the same image. You can use that same technique to highly vary the same textures, e.g. to make what looks like a variety of vegetation with different angled leaves which actually are all using the same texture. “Final graphics” here aren’t finished before the game is played, their final state is generated IN the game in realtime.

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Thanks for the reply! That’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m looking to figure out. I’m a programmer and artist so I’m plenty happy to dive deep into the technical details on how to pull of those kinds of things.

With some of the vocabulary you introduced, I should have an easier time finding more on the matter.

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