The environment art was created by me Carter Bugatto, here was my process and thinking behind the assets that made up the level from conception to the Unity project.

The inspiration for the environment assets is based off of the level concepts created in the GDD by Parker. The concept art depicted two distinct levels; an oil rig with large sets of piping and versus a city rooftop surrounded by skyscrapers. in our single level we decided to lean into the city-style environment. Parker’s visual inspirations came from a set of late 90’s/early 2000s abstract graphic design and collage work from designers/artists like Joshua Davis and Carlos Gonzales.

In my recreation of this style for the assets I wanted to follow closely to parkers vision. I made each asset out of flat colours from a custom colour palette with calming/consistent tones showing contrast through hues over light. I created my own Pinterest moldboard taking Parkers inspirations and expanding on them also including specific inspirations from video games like Mirrors Edge that also display a similar art style/vibe.

Base Albedo Texture (Photoshop)

All of the assets were created in a single Blender 4 file using a grid to keep consistent measurements and to compare the textures to allow the palettes to work for certain combinations of environment assets. Along with the environment I cerated the intractable assets which in contrast to the environment had textures with detailing that I created from images within photoshop slightly smoothing them reminiscent of objects in Little Big Planet. As mentioned in the GDD this contrast in texture style would indicate to the player that these objects could be intractable/rigid to the player.

Initial Platform Assets in Blender

Importing to Unity was quite easy as it was just adding them to the assets folder, applying collisions and applying the shaders. The shaders were custom built in Unity using tutorials and taking the texture map I created for the Blender objects. By having the same albedo texture and UV’s the objects looked the same as in Blender but now with the desired flat toon lighting. This was complimented by a simple outline shader that applied on top of the toon shader. These shaders are dynamic and could be simply dragged onto any new asset if it had the same albedo texture.

Unity Environment Assets with Shaders Applied

Assets required minimal fixing post-addition besides glitches with the faces/normals. I added sets of assets based on demand for the level in waves such as a set of sports-themed assets with a more warm red and yellow tone.

Scrapped Hub world Environment (Blender)