Knocking Down The Walls & Retexturing

We're getting closer and closer to finally getting the store page up [for wishlists, release date is still TBC] and getting the trailer ready; but unfortunately, things have taken a few steps backwards in the last couple of weeks.

One of the primary issues that needed to be addressed is the walls of the arenas. The levels are built using a library of modular models, and ideally, we wanted to be able to reduce the number of models and just be able to swap out textures to switch between the different themes. Unfortunately, some early decisions caused issues in doing this in terms of how they join up. There were a few little visual tricks/hacks that had mitigated this, but they'll unfortunately not work for all the level themes, which has meant we've had to scrap the original walls and start again.

In our case, this has thankfully not been a huge undertaking, as the rest of the world has kept a consistent scale and we only have 10-15 pieces for the walls that need reworking; but, for anyone embarking on a bigger project that has a more dynamic range of objects (in terms of their scale), making this same mistake could be very costly.

Something that has been a huge help during this process, is yet another free asset pack from Kenney - the Prototypes Textures pack, which you can download From Here.

Using these prototype textures, it was possible to perfectly unwrap our models and keep a consistent scale between every modular wall, allowing for them to seamlessly join together.

A huge thank you to Kenney for these textures, the assets they create and make freely available to the game dev community are amazing and I would encourage anyone who can to head over to their Itch page and consider spending a bit of money to support them.