From lines to polygons, and back to lines.

This game’s art style is heavily inspired both by lowpoly games, and by BD/manga style, with watercolor textures and black linework to add details.

Since our last dev-log, Khaleer advanced on the modeling of the building, (based on concept art by Amir ).

The first step is a block-in with mostly flat colors. Around this time, the UV space is laid out to facilitate painting textures in a 2D program (like Krita).

Then, we usually do a value check: which part will be brightest? is there enough contrast? etc. In this case, we needed more hierarchy of light vs dark albedo.

Our Character Designer Majikarpette likes this Dota 2 art style guide for reference on value planning for readability of top-down characters, which we want to apply to the readability of buildings too.

The assets created for the kitchen can be used to prototype the assets of a warehouse building, as seen in this quick test put together by Eno.

The Kitchen building by Khaleer inside of Godot Engine with a line art of 2pixels using this shader.

Next week, we will be diving into the details of the main methods used for line art styles, shader vs hand-placed approaches, and why -in the age of Nanite- we still want to stay as low-poly as possible.