Grey-boxing in ProBuilder enabled Acid Nerve to get a feel for each level before they needed to create and add in assets, saving both time and costs. Foster and Fenn did all of Death’s Door’s programming, game design, and writing themselves, but outsourced concept art, UI art, and 3D asset creation.
“The 3D stage is when you need to start paying people for your concepts and models,” explains Fenn. “For us, it was the most time-consuming part of constructing levels and making them really detailed. You don’t want to be doing that until you’re sure your level is exactly how you want it to be.”
The finalized ProBuilder blockout served as a foundation for the concept artist they were working with. Fenn unpacks this collaborative process further: “We’d take a screen of the game that had good examples of the kind of assets we’d need – architectural elements, rocks, detail, and some things just for the aesthetic… We’d draw all over our ProBuilder and figure out exactly what modules to get modeled, and then start adding them to each scene.”
Once the world design was finalized, they could start working on assets. The team’s 3D artist used Maya for models, 3D Coat for textures, and Blender for rigging. “We were able to import all of these assets into Unity without any hassle,” says Foster.
Source: Unity Technologies Blog