Developer Diary: Bringing a Mushroom to Life
Welcome to our first Developer Diary! In these diaries, we’ll be taking you behind the scenes of Mushroom Mania’s development — how we are bringing the game to life.
For this Developer Diary, we share our art process in creating voxel assets for The Sandbox, particularly our mushroom enemies.
Artistic Direction
Before we began making mushrooms, we needed to determine three essential things:
- Art Style: We wanted to capture the look and feel of a fantasy action adventure game.
- Scale: The assets are all oversized because of the game’s shrunken perspective, which made it possible for us to add intricate details to objects that are usually too small to be seen, such as the dots in a mushroom’s cap.
- Color Palette: We chose highly saturated colors for a vibrant and energetic mood: warm earth tones for the first level, Bright Creek, and cool colors for the second level, Rocky Hollow.
Rough 2D Concepts
Then we started iterating on mushroom concepts. We aimed for a cute, whimsical, and colorful character design, experimenting with different unique body shapes and silhouettes based on function.
Smaller mushrooms are mostly bodiless except for their heads and mushroom “hats” while tank-type enemies have large, complete bodies with limbs. The mushroom hats also came in various shapes and patterns to make them more distinct from each other in voxel form.
Polishing the 2D Concepts
Here’s an example: meet Bright Mush Brawler, our melee mushroom from Bright Creek. Starting from a basic-looking mushroom, we made multiple studies and experimented with different stances and features.
The concept with mushroom cap gloves was the best choice for a melee fighter. In the final polish, we emphasized his fists and added more details to improve his silhouette.
The last phase was to determine the sizes of each mushroom enemy in relation to the player, using voxels.
Creating Turnarounds
Once we had the scale, it was time to create a turnaround. The turnaround serves as our guide to creating the 3D asset, showing the exact dimensions of the character so we know how big the bounding box for each part will be.
We made our 3D assets using VoxEdit, an all-in-one editing software developed by The Sandbox team that can create, rig, and animate voxel models. We also used VoxEdit to create palettes using color values from the concept art. This ensured that we were using accurate colors for the voxelized characters, plus it was more efficient to load the palette for each body part we created.
Voxel Translation
When we started voxelizing the Bright Mush Brawler, the initial models were too detailed and curvy, exceeding the face count allowed. We needed to simplify and remodel the asset in order to meet the maximum requirements.
3D Rigging and Animation
Once we finished the model, we created a skeleton and attached each of the components to the correct places.
Then we proceeded to animate using forward kinematics: we rotate the joints similar to how you play with action figures. It was a fun challenge!
As we made more assets, the process became faster and easier for us. There was no need to start from scratch since we already have existing scales and models.
Final 3D Asset
Once the animations were done, it was time to export the asset and place it in the game! We use GameMaker (game design software also by The Sandbox) to place it in the 3D voxel world. We’ll share our level design process for Mushroom Mania in a separate article.
All of these mushrooms are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that will be available on The Sandbox marketplace soon, for use by both players and creators. More mushroom enemies can be encountered in the game, so make sure you pre-register on The Sandbox website to be notified when it is available.
Thank you for reading! Follow us here on Medium for our upcoming announcements and sneak peeks on Mushroom Mania. And please clap or share if you like this article!
Website: http://mushroommania.io/
Discord: https://discord.gg/GmrutpcEc4
Telegram: https://t.me/MushroomManiaGame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MushroomManiaGame/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MushroomMania_
About Altitude Games
Altitude Games is a Manila-based game studio behind the blockchain game Battle Racers and free-to-play mobile games Kung Fu Clicker, Holy Ship! (3rd IMGA SEA Best Quickplay), Dream Defense (2017 Android Excellence for Fall), and Run Run Super V. The company was founded in 2014 by veterans of the Southeast Asian game industry. Learn more at www.altitude-games.com.
About The Sandbox
The Sandbox is a community-driven gaming platform that empowers game makers to create, publish, and monetize a myriad of unique experiences on a decentralized platform with cryptocurrency payments. With the support of millions of creators around the world, their goal is to make The Sandbox the new standard in world-building games, with millions of user-created 3D voxel assets and games available as NFTs on the blockchain. Learn more at www.sandbox.game.
