Development of the Chaos Tower
Our plan for the development of the game has included the introduction of towers of the six magic classes (Life, Death, Order, Chaos, Water, Fire) from the very beginning - accordingly, we release new towers at regular intervals with our beta patches.
For the current version (beta 0.5), it's the turn of the Chaos and Order towers.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1866380/Mystic_Towerdefense/
We started with brainstorming (what the tower should be able to do and what it should look like). This resulted in the first concepts for the new tower:
Creation of the 3D model
With the concepts in mind, we started modeling the tower in Blender.
We use a high- to low-poly workflow. This means that we first take care of modeling the model as it should look in the game.
Then we work on reducing the number of polygons as much as possible so that the model costs as little performance as possible in the game.
(Left highpoly, right lowpoly model)
Designing the textures
The finished models were used to create the textures in "Substance Painter".
To do this, the details of the high-poly model are "baked" onto the low-poly model - this means that the details are no longer located directly in the model, but are "outsourced" to the texture.
This method is common practice in almost all games and offers the advantage of achieving a high level of detail without the models requiring a very high polygon density.
(Good to see in the texture of the monster, which contains the detailed tentacles, while the model only has flat tentacles).
The textures of the Chaos Tower (tower on the left, monster on the right):
Animation of the tentacles & eyes
So the model doesn't just stand around motionless in the game, we added an animation rig (giving the model a skeleton. With the help of this skeleton (rig), the monster's tentacles could be controlled and the eyes move.
Merging model, textures and animations in Unity
We use the game engine Unity, as it is particularly suitable for small indie games like ours. Here we have merged the models, textures and animations to be able to program the model in the engine.
You can see the result of our work below.
We would be delighted if you would leave us a like on social media and add our game to your wishlist.
You can get an insight into version 0.4 via the demo link below.
Best regards,
Jan & Dennis