Styling & Assets
The Look and Feel of HYTOPIA
Last updated
The Look and Feel of HYTOPIA
Last updated
HYTOPIA's art style standards are intended to create a fun, imaginative, consistent, and flexible visual experience for the player. Unlike other platforms' unfocused and chaotic art styles, HYTOPIA is putting more energy into maintaining the unique charm of it's blockiness!
One of the most powerful things about HYTOPIA is its refined blocky-style. Restrictions/guidelines on visual styles actually have a positive effect, forcing creators to think outside the box and be more creative. In addition to encouraging creative thinking and problem solving, our low-poly style also makes for quick iteration, and significant performance advantages.
In full voxel-style games, all game elements are made of up squares (voxels). These voxels are typically the same size, or mostly the same size, throughout the game. HYTOPIA takes a hybrid-approach, we call “blocky”. While “blocky” is also based on cubes as its elements, doesn't rely on the smallest scale unit (1x1x1) nearly as much. Instead, objects are constructed using differently sized cubes, which best represent the given object, albeit in an chunky/cartoonish way.
HYTOPIA’s blocky style is very important to the platform. By sticking to a blocky, low-polygon 3D standard, we solve two major challenges all game developers encounter:
Ease of Asset Creation
Creating realistic 3D-models is extremely time-consuming, requiring multiple artists working full-time to create the content required for the game. Creating blocky assets is both easier and quicker, dramatically reducing overall game production time.
Performance Optimization
3D Models are groups of meshes, which are composed from faces called Polygons. Generally, the in-game performance impact of a specific model is directly correlated to Polygon count. The more polygons, the slower the performance due to the GPU having to process more data. Because blocky models are built from blocks, they generally are significantly lower poly counts, leading to less intense resource requirements.
FAQ: Can I use any model, or does it have to be voxel?HYTOPIA doesn’t enforce styling or poly count in-game, but we highly discourage using high-poly or non-voxel models, due to the risk of significant performance degradation. However, HYTOPIA does enforce the voxel style within the marketplace.
A lot of the time, you'll likely want to modify an existing HYTOPIA model or asset. For example, perhaps you want to add a new special attack animation specific to your game on the player model.
You can find all of the raw BlockBench compatible HYTOPIA models and other assets that you are free to modify for your own HYTOPIA game's use, here:
