Parallax scrolling

As it was mentioned in Chapter 1, Starting the Game, continuous backgrounds and foregrounds for games are created using small images tiled together, creating an illusion of a very long graphic strip. The more pieces the game has, the more varied is the appearance of the strip. Although this is only a compilation of flat images, an artistic illusion of 3D space can be created to divide the scenery by individual layers, changing their position at various speeds. The foreground will move normally, the further ones will be slower and the most distant will almost stand still. Such a visual scene convinces the viewer that it has depth, interpreting it as the natural physical phenomenon known as parallax . It characterizes the apparent alteration of a visible object's position against a far background when viewers changes their location. The closest objects change their position very noticeably (in other words, they have a pretty big parallax), but the distant ones alternate...