Today I received the following message "I came across your game on Twitter and it looks VERY different from what I played in the previous build. Did you do a massive overhaul?"
So people are starting to notice the change and it's time to tell about it properly.
Yes, we changed the visual look of the game.
I know a lot of people like Crawlyard for its cartoony and simplistic graphics. But the truth is, most of it were graphical assets from the Unity store, which is not really our level - we can do so much more.
There's also always not enough assets there either way, we need a lot of out custom graphics to use it as an element of environmental storytelling. I guess now you can say that 70% of visuals is fully made by our 3D modellers.
After the October's demo we also wanted to make the visuals more theatrical. What I mean by this is that all of the objects on scenes would be made out of cardboard or paper, clouds would hang on the threads from the ceiling, and the floor would always be made of wood.
But when we tried it out, we quickly understood that this style of visuals will always be perceived by players as a very "niche" game, and that's not really the direction we want to undertake. While our first priority is to make a deckbuilder that would surprise the fans of the genre, we also want to make this game as approachable as it could be. That means going with safe, but solid directions in terms of visual style.
We also changed camera perspective to isometric as it allows for more depth and more space covered by the camera, so battle arenas become larger and thus open more possibilities during combat. The Break Distance card, that every one of you hated in the demo, now works way better with this camera view.
Really curious to hear what people that tried the demo think and feel about the new game's visuals.
Cheers, I'm out. See ya in the next one.
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Always yours, Crawlyard's game designer.