some crunchy gifs in case you don't want videos:
The water shader was totally bought because I realized I didn't have enough time to experiment with shaders, I wanted to devote that to writing (Definitely the hardest part of this whole game) and figuring out texturing style for the rest of the assets.
Early vibe check. You can see that I made the palm trees too high when compared to the camera height. Even though I was relatively early I said fuck it and just made the camera taller. A single rock is bigger than all my other projects' assets haha.
first things i set up were a really rough sculpt terrain as well as a shader (that i totally bought bc i didnt have time to do water from scratch and this one had built in splashes!). it is cool to look back and see that my first "finished" assets were the palm tree and the cactus. here's a closer look:
I actually tried texturing the palm tree using Clip Studio Paint's 3D model functionality. It was pretty awful, not going to lie! I powered on through but the finishing touches, especially the seams, I ended up doing in Substance Painter. This close you can see how different the cactus and the palm tree are colored
spitefulfox, my programmer, put in all the placeholder text including all the wonderful jokes.
so yeah. even though im an artist foremost and focused on graphics first, the art was nowhere near done---that took a couple months, in between all the other things i had to do. games are wild and held by ducktape and that's why it's so funny to make them.