I’ve spent the last several days thinking about the overall art style of the game.  I very much like the low-poly look I’ve been using thus far but my concern is that I’ll be too limited if I ever want to add assets that need more details.  The primary thing that comes to mind is faces.  It’s way, way cheaper to just draw a cartoon face onto a few triangles than to model and render geometry for eyes and mouths.  Also clothing and equipment may be difficult to keep interesting and varied if every distinction between one piece and another has to be in the geometry.  I’m not ready to go full-blown Blizzard-style art assets yet, but I’ve starting creating assets that have a single, small diffuse texture attached.  I can then create a color palette on the texture and just assign faces of the mesh to the desired color.  It keeps the low-poly look but also gives me the flexibility to use gradients or even just hand drawn textures where needed.  I’m still feeling all this out, but the versatility of using textures is undeniable.

I’ve also been working on getting a better player character in the game.  I found a nice little human character on opengameart.org and modified it some to suit my needs, then rigged it and created an idle and a run animation in Blender.  I then loaded it up into Lyridia, and lo and behold I have a decent looking character that runs and kind of looks around when he’s not running.  Super cool.  Not sure what I’ll work on next, but I’m excited to be making progress again.