To give you the full picture, let’s start from the beginning. As we said, we purchased ready-made assets. We acquired various materials to test our ideas. At this stage, we created gray prototypes based on concepts and experimented with low-poly models with simple textures. This was essential to quicken the game’s development. Now, let’s share what came out of this process.

Right from the start, after purchasing the ready-made assets, we faced the need for significant adjustments in materials, scales, and styles of the assets themselves. This led to our first experiments in creating locations and visual effects, which allowed us to quickly do a playable island.

While our work on locations progressed successfully, we encountered challenges with character models due to our inexperience with low-poly modeling. The process of creating characters requested time and effort, especially when attempting to adjust stylized concepts into 3D. Turned out, making characters look like actual characters and not geometric nightmares is harder than it sounds.

We realized that working with low-poly models did not achieve the desired effect. This raised the question: why stick to a style that fails to impress if switching to high-poly models can improve visual quality without genuinely extending development time? Therefore, we decided to complicate our character models by adding more polygons and abandoning low-poly stylization, while still maintaining our 3D art style. Surprisingly, this step allowed us to speed up the art production process and improve the game’s visual quality. It’s important to note that we are not abandoning ready-made assets and will use them as sketches for further refinement.

Well, how about this transformation from pig to warg? And you wouldn’t recognize Farro anymore!

Recently, we have made significant strides in content development, creating new character models, armor, weapons, and upgrading environments and visual effects. Our journey in evolving our art process and optimization continues, and we are confident in the direction we’ve chosen. Not one step back!

However, there’s still much to be done: from location update and creating new islands to improving animations and working on finer details. Our mission? To take the WorldShards game world to the next level!

Stay tuned for the next Dev Diaries!