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.
All biomes need to start somewhere! The goal at this first stage was to establish the art direction and mood, and get something roughly playable that can be easily evaluated and tweaked.
With the technical hurdles out of the way, now it was time to focus on the visual quality bar. 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, and 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.