If you read our first devlog, you will see that "My Name Is Asterion" was first prototyped as a full 2d game. Moving to a 3d scenario was a bold step that, on our case, opened several possibilities regarding the mood and atmosphere, which is something that we care a lot about. We did also achieve a quite interesting aesthetics with the mix of 3d world and 2d characters.
But it is now time to make a new and maybe bolder move: We are going full 3d!
We like our 2d characters. They have personality and they are stylish. But dealing with 2d is not always simple. It is sometimes, in fact, much harder to work with it than with 3d.
Specially when you want to explore lighting and camera, our main reasons behind this decision.
The problem is that when we consider the atmosphere we want to achieve, the story that we want to tell, and how we want to tell, lighting and camera are very useful tools that we cannot afford to be limited with. And with 2d, certain angles, moves and lights just don’t work, or aren’t cool as it could be. There are certainly some workarounds, and we have been working with them since our first prototypes. But as we did our first 3d experiments, we were amazed on how many new doors we had to explore. I guess that being limited at first contributed to that, but still, it looked very promising:
But the decision, of course, doesn’t come without its price, I have a friend that says that “the blanket is always short” and, by that, he means that you either cover your feet, or you cover your head. And so it happens every time you have to make a decision, you must renounce something. And on this case, the biggest problem was that maybe the art-style would suffer and that wouldn’t be something that we would easily renounce.
To fix that, and make the decision less harder, we tried some experiments on our textures and shaders, and after some iterations we reached a very interesting result:
After that, we were sure on making our move. Of course that by making it, we have new challenges, the project requires a lot of new work, and demands a new set of skills.
But we are positive that we can manage that. And not only that, we are positive that we can bring a better experience to the players.
As you can see, we were experimenting not with the Minotaur, but with a generic 3d human model. So I couldn’t end this post without showing you our latest Asterion 3d Draft:
I hope you get excited as we did!
Cheers,
José
@joserodolfo_f
@spinnerzeit
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