My first major task at Stoic was to nail down the art style for environments and produce a scalable pipeline for both 2D and 3D artists.
Fungi Forest was the first playable biome created for Towerborne. This was the process to establish our quality bar.
We started off with some initial concepts from Arnie Jorgensen. Asset paints were then created by both Arnie and Eric Dagley. Eric comped these assets with painted lighting in Photoshop as reference.
At this stage, I had to iron out the proper export pipeline for 2D Artists, while solidifying the naming convention and implementation process for Unreal.
Once all 2D assets were implemented into Unreal, I could start set dressing the stages. We only needed a few standard stage pieces early on to prove out the procedural system we were intending to use for mission design.
I wanted to better utilize the environment features packaged into Unreal to improve lighting & atmosphere, as well as introduce more 3D assets into the scene.
This required some experimenting with handpainted normal maps and displacement maps for our 2D assets to help integrate them into the scene better.
Before Early Access launch, we needed to make all of our lighting HDR compatible. Pavel Elagin volunteered for this task for Fungi Forest. He was able to bring a richness to the scene with this final pass.
I’m really proud of where this biome landed in the end. It was the test bed for Stoic’s procedural mission system, as well as art style exploration.
It became the guiding light for all future biomes.
Assets and set dressing pictured are made by a huge array of people at Stoic and Airborn:
Myself, Eric Dagley, Pavel Elagin, Pedro Damasceno, Dominik Gröstlinger, Ilka Hesche, Jeremy Boulivet, Jonas Kunert, Valeria Traverso, and Kaat Van Thillo