Cheesecalibur

This game is built entirely with 2D assets rendered as cards on a 3D environment, achieving a cartoony and painterly look.

A great amount of work was put into achieving the right amount of stylization in the textures and proportions: a mushroom must look both believable for a tiny world and yet magical, while the mouse skulls must look ominous but not off-puttingly gruesome.

The main visual concept is a mundane world as seen through a young mouse’s imagination, where every frogotten item on the floor is an ancient monolith or a legendary ruin ripe for exploration.

Smaller objects, like coins and lego bricks, are strewn about like rocks and boulders. Larger obstacles, like salt shakers and broken pencils, serve as landmarks and barriers. The largest assets, weeds and broken clay planter pieces, serve to corral the playable islands and fade into black as they grow downward into the mysterious, pitch-black floor of the world.

Additional textures were added to give the world an abandoned appearance, overgrown with moss and caked in dirt, while keeping the overall palette colorful and wondrous. Out of bounds vegetations has a noticeably cooler hue.

Each element is made to face the camera at a right angle, preserving the illusion of volume even as the point of view rolls further back into the horizon. This satisfying feeling of venturing through giant tufts of grass and half buried cutlery is one of the team’s proudest achievements.