I woke up Sunday morning knowing a daunting task lay ahead. That's right. It was time to make a tree.

Anyone can throw together a quick two-dimensional tree by borrowing textures from the Web. But I wanted the pleasure of knowing all textures in the game were built from the ground up. Sadly, I'm not a professional artist so I knew I'd need a lot of reference points.

By noon I was asking questions that, until now, didn't seem all that profound. What makes tree bark look like tree bark? What makes a tree easily identifiable as pine versus any other type? One by one, I pulled down textures and tutorials offered by a wide array of skilled and generous artists (using the standard tools like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop). I studied the texture patterns, experimented with countless tools and brushes, and ended up with respectable -- but nowhere near perfect -- results.

Experimentation was certainly the key, and to that end I would've made Thomas Edison proud. Many images started off looking terrible, but with a few tweaks the momentum would often shift. And so it went, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, and by the time I finished the fifth tree it was two in the morning. An entire day spent on nothing but trees. Good grief.

The good news is they really do add some atmosphere to the zone. Unfortunately, in order to keep the download sizes relatively small, I'll need to adopt the "cookie cutter" approach and plot many instances of the same tree. Some variation in tree sizes and/or orientation might make that a little less obvious.