DuneCrawl is now out on Steam! 🦀

Hi everyone! Ariane here to dive into how we tackled the environmental art for our game Dunecrawl. By using 2D hand drawn artwork projected onto 3D meshes, we were able to create a unique aesthetic while also saving us some production headaches.

Working in 2D is also much, much faster for our small studio. Instead of having to build a detailed 3D mesh for every single object, it’s quicker to draw them by hand. Dunecrawl has thousands of environmental objects and we don’t want it to take decades, you know? Why use 3D at all then? Making fully 2D isometric games can be very tricky. The game engine needs to know what objects are in front or behind others, how to render them onscreen, and how characters interact with them. This was solved a bunch of different ways for classic 2D isometric games, and frankly, they’re all a real pain. Being able to use true 3D objects for building levels and moving characters around is much more straightforward in a modern engine like Unity. Our game camera isn’t totally isometric. It has a very small field of view, so that we can have a bit of perspective parallaxing when the camera moves! This effect would be very difficult with a fully 2D engine.