I threw out about 4 months of progress in order to speed things up.
The original art style for my game was relatively high fidelity. Each model required high poly and low poly baked versions, good normal, bump and specular maps, and high-resolution textures. Lights were all volumetric and everything was dynamic. Below is a screenshot of how it was looking just before I made the decision to switch things up.



most of the environment was textured using a Tri planar material which saved some time as i didn't have to unwrap everything, but still, that wasn't saving enough time.

Early on, I was able to maintain a good speed during production for things like the environment and a few enemies, but soon I realized this wasn't sustainable over the course of the entire project. I was using a Tri planar shader to apply a dirty metallic material to most of the environment. This meant i didn't need to spend time uv unwrapping everything, though I did have to apply vertex colours to each piece if I wanted them to be different colours. This saved some time, but I soon realized it wasn't enough, when considering the scope of the whole project. 

Switching art styles

After some thought I opted to go for a more retro look. Something from the late 90s / very early 00s. This meant everything would need to be thrown out and I would have to start again from scratch. I wasn't too worried about my decision though, because soon after I was able to create more assets at lightning speed. Whole environments, collision included, took hours instead of days and weeks. Character models were much easier to put together, as I no longer needed to deal with high/low poly versions. The materials only used basic diffuse textures, so I didn't need to worry with bump or normal maps. This change in style also means visual effects don't need to be ultra-modern either, which will save even more time down the line.

All of these changes allowed me to focus more on created what I really wanted to, rather than what I had the time to do. 


all the assets are very simple geometric shapes. Because of this, I don't need to make custom collision for everything, and can get away with just using "complex as simple". 



I'm working on the game every day, and I hope to get a demo ready soon. Stick around to follow along with updates, or join my discord to chat. 

cheers