A New Game Dev Frontier - Low Poly Assets!

Sarrah Wilkinson - 3/8/2022

To get in some solid Blender practice and stretch my creative legs a bit, I'm working on a low poly asset pack, specifically a set of modular dungeon pieces for the Unity game engine.

So, what is an asset pack? Well, it's a collection of ready-made parts that game developers can use to put together scenes and levels for their game. They can be used for prototyping or as a finished product, and make it quick and easy to put together a great looking dungeon without having to create all the pieces first! In this case, I'm working on a set of 3D assets in the modeling program, Blender. My plan for the finished pack is over 200 separate models, including some animated pieces and special effects, all set up in Unity and ready to go.

Low poly can really mean one of two things. In one sense, it just refers to the poly count of the 3d model. A cube, for example, has 6 faces - hence, 6 polygons, or polys - but a complicated digital sculpture like a boss monster might have tens of thousands of polys! (In fact, while you're sculpting, the number may even be in the millions, but that gets reduced for use in a game engine. Neat stuff!)

In the second sense, low poly is also a type of style. A deliberately low poly styled scene has a cartoonish look, and often the individual faces of the models are visible, rather than shaded smooth. This can make it look blocky, quirky, and heavily stylized. That's exactly what I'm going for here!

Above, you can see a few example pieces I've been working on: walls, pillars, a dungeon cell door, a wall with an inset alcove, furniture, and decorative items like the bottle and key.

Here in this exploded view, you can see what I mean by modular. Each piece is sectioned off so they can be fit together in virtually any configuration, just like Lego bricks! The walls and floors are also set up to be tileable, so there's no interruption between one piece and the next. The wall with the archway can be fitted with multiple types of doors, not just the cell door shown.

I look forward to showing more as this project goes on!

Categories: Games
Tags: 3d modeling, blender, chair, dungeon, game, game assets, game dev, game development, indie, key, low poly, modular, pillars, prison, screenshot, Unity, wall
Live Date: 3/8/2022 | Last Modified: 3/8/2022