The Art Of Aztez
polycounter lvl 18
Hey Polycount! I'm Ben Ruiz and I'm the artist and combat designer at Team Colorblind, and we're about to release our flagship game Aztez on August 1st. I thought maybe the Polycount community would like to see first hand the dumb shit I did to make this game work.
This is what Aztez looks like in motion.
This is what Aztez looks like in motion.
Here is the launch trailer if you want a little more.
The situation with Team Colorblind is that I am the entire art and combat department. We've had some baller support from a few other artists! But I'm the one full-timer. So my artistic goal from the start was to create something striking, but also something realistic enough for myself to produce.
The situation with Team Colorblind is that I am the entire art and combat department. We've had some baller support from a few other artists! But I'm the one full-timer. So my artistic goal from the start was to create something striking, but also something realistic enough for myself to produce.
You here in the Polycount community will most likely know this from looking at it, but Aztez is fully 3d. It's been a weird point of confusion with fans/players for a long time.
I'm not using a post-processing shader for the outlines either, I'm just using the traditional method of having an inverted shell of a solid color.
95% of the game's objects are using one texture I created before even opening Maya. It's just a big swatch of Mesoamerican patterns, with an emphasis on the motifs of the 15th century Nahuatl speakers of the Valley of Mexico.
As you can see, I build primarily in more primitive lego-style shapes that I use to make bigger and more complicated things. A lot of it gets cobbled together, packaged up, re-used, stretched/scaled, etc. Eventually I had a big library of super objects made from these lego pieces.
I realize there is absolutely NOTHING inventive about this but the time saving is too strong, especially in the construction of 60ish environments. Here's a wide shot of one of them.
The game is powered almost exclusively by one shader that simply changes the "lightness" of it's texture by changing the alpha value. It's pretty sweet because I just keep a handful of mutations around at different lightness levels, and they're all just pointing to the swatch.
The game is 100% self illuminated, and only uses fog effects during certain weather conditions that occur during the game. I did it this way so that light/shadow wouldn't be a wild card and to keep the depth perception completely under my control. I've built all of the game's environments in layers of lightness.
Character construction is super straightforward; we have one master body/skeleton powering every single combatant and background character and god. It's the least clever shit ever but it meant production was narrowed down to gear models/textures, which ALSO meant customizable characters would be very easy to implement.
Here's some character concepts in case you're into that sort of thing. The original concepts were much simpler and boring, so I eventually created bigger concept pieces that we could also use as promotional assets.
We've got a pretty reasonable amount of enemies in the game. They're broken up into types and each has three distinct levels (difficulties) that have more advanced behavior and more attacks unique to them.
As far as effects are concerned, we're not actually doing anything insane. 99% of the game's effects are standard shuriken effects (unity's built in effects object). The one exception is our blood, which is 1 of our 2 post-processing effects. This is an earlier version, but we wanted that globby viscous look and this programmer friend of ours killed it.
The combat/impact effects are the majority of the game's effects. I actually made a combat effects interactive demo a couple years back that you can play with now if you'd like. You can fire the entire effect or any of the sub-effects individually. Feel free to dig into that.
My effects aren't anything special; they're just big stacks of individual effects.
Oh and our weapon trails are just about the most crude things imaginable. They're just meshes that scale and I hand-time them to the attack. Haha!
As far as hardware goes, we use Unity (have been since 1.5), and I use Maya and Motionbuilder.
You can see the talk I gave at GDC that covers a lot of this but goes way more into detail. It's an hour though, so YAWN.
Feel free to light me up with questions! I'll answer them all. And if you want to support the game, just add it to your steam wishlist.
I'm not using a post-processing shader for the outlines either, I'm just using the traditional method of having an inverted shell of a solid color.
95% of the game's objects are using one texture I created before even opening Maya. It's just a big swatch of Mesoamerican patterns, with an emphasis on the motifs of the 15th century Nahuatl speakers of the Valley of Mexico.
As you can see, I build primarily in more primitive lego-style shapes that I use to make bigger and more complicated things. A lot of it gets cobbled together, packaged up, re-used, stretched/scaled, etc. Eventually I had a big library of super objects made from these lego pieces.
I realize there is absolutely NOTHING inventive about this but the time saving is too strong, especially in the construction of 60ish environments. Here's a wide shot of one of them.
The game is powered almost exclusively by one shader that simply changes the "lightness" of it's texture by changing the alpha value. It's pretty sweet because I just keep a handful of mutations around at different lightness levels, and they're all just pointing to the swatch.
The game is 100% self illuminated, and only uses fog effects during certain weather conditions that occur during the game. I did it this way so that light/shadow wouldn't be a wild card and to keep the depth perception completely under my control. I've built all of the game's environments in layers of lightness.
Character construction is super straightforward; we have one master body/skeleton powering every single combatant and background character and god. It's the least clever shit ever but it meant production was narrowed down to gear models/textures, which ALSO meant customizable characters would be very easy to implement.
Here's some character concepts in case you're into that sort of thing. The original concepts were much simpler and boring, so I eventually created bigger concept pieces that we could also use as promotional assets.
We've got a pretty reasonable amount of enemies in the game. They're broken up into types and each has three distinct levels (difficulties) that have more advanced behavior and more attacks unique to them.
As far as effects are concerned, we're not actually doing anything insane. 99% of the game's effects are standard shuriken effects (unity's built in effects object). The one exception is our blood, which is 1 of our 2 post-processing effects. This is an earlier version, but we wanted that globby viscous look and this programmer friend of ours killed it.
The combat/impact effects are the majority of the game's effects. I actually made a combat effects interactive demo a couple years back that you can play with now if you'd like. You can fire the entire effect or any of the sub-effects individually. Feel free to dig into that.
My effects aren't anything special; they're just big stacks of individual effects.
Oh and our weapon trails are just about the most crude things imaginable. They're just meshes that scale and I hand-time them to the attack. Haha!
As far as hardware goes, we use Unity (have been since 1.5), and I use Maya and Motionbuilder.
You can see the talk I gave at GDC that covers a lot of this but goes way more into detail. It's an hour though, so YAWN.
Feel free to light me up with questions! I'll answer them all. And if you want to support the game, just add it to your steam wishlist.
Replies
I think your ultra omni-texture solution worked really well for your environments. Nice work on everything!