Conclusion
This has been the most enjoyable project I have worked on so far, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any struggles and challenges along the way. The initial concept is incredibly intricate and had a specific style to it which was hard to understand and even more so, extend into a full-scale environment. I really struggled finalising a style that I wanted to stick with during the early stages of this project. At this point, I showed the scene to some of my close friends who work in the field and many of them mentioned that it reminds them of high fantasy art that you might see in “ The Lord of the Rings” or “The Witcher”. I fell in love with this idea as high fantasy is one of my favourite settings, and quickly adapted the environment shortly after.
If I had to take one thing forward to my future projects, it would be to always consider consistency in style and detail. I struggled with understanding texel density and efficiency at the start of the project, so I had key assets using tiling textures to compensate and it just didn’t look good enough for the level of impact the asset had. So, structuring the asset better to hit the quality goal could have saved a lot of time.
Finally, at the end of the day, style is king. Even if graphical fidelity is low, you can still create a powerful piece of art through style alone. So, consider this as early as possible and more importantly, stick to this in every aspect of development.