Hello there!
Long time no see, we know, but that doesn't mean we weren't working hard on the game during this time!
Today, let's talk about graphics. Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a city-builder, so obviously, one of the most important graphical assets we need to make are buildings. There will be 100+ 3D building models in the game (some buildings will have multiple visual variations, as will be shown below) as we want to enable you to create beautiful and varied towns, not filled with "clones".
This is why some of the structures have different visual variations. Take houses for example, which will be ever present in the residential districts. This is how many 3D models of those we have now:
(click here to zoom in)
In general, there are only three types of houses, one for citizens of each caste. Houses can be upgraded up to three times, so that's four upgrade stages for each house. Then, each house stage has four visual variations, depending on its surroundings. If you take all of the combinations, the picture above shows you what you end up with :)
This is a lot of 3D models to make, but as a result, you don't have a feeling that your town consists of tons of copy-pasted buildings.
But at the beginning, we didn't have all of these variations, of course. It was just one 3D model for each upgrade stage, even missing the one for the highest upgrade.
Actually, this is exactly what we had when releasing our first trailer: click here for the Reveal trailer
Our next step was to create prototypes of all the missing variations, to figure out the rough geometry and shapes the models should have to look good with each other.
And once we were happy with the results, we could add some more detail to have all the variations at the same quality level.
This is where we are now, but the work doesn't stop here! All of the house models will go through the final polishing pass, to add some more detail and textures, correct/optimize their geometry data and simply make them look more realistic (but within the game's art style, of course).
Holidays!
All right, all right, we weren't working ALL the time - we had a few weeks off to charge batteries before digging deep in the development work again. It's good to have time for taking in some inspiration :)
And that's all for this update! Thank you very much for your support, we will be back with some more juicy info about the game soon :)
Maciek & Michał