Bringing Life and Our Pipeline

Hey everyone! My name is Stephen Biechele, and I’m part of the environmental art team for our game Beta Breakers. As Ian Stoops mentioned in his earlier post, Beta Breakers is a rogue-like action RPG. While he focused on the level design and layout, I’ll be diving into how Jaden and I work alongside Ian to bring those levels to life through environmental art.

On the art side, we’ve developed a solid pipeline. I handle most of the major building and environment modeling, while Ian and Jaden focus more on props and smaller details. To keep the game’s look consistent, Jaden also takes the lead on texturing. With my modeling, Jaden’s textures, and Ian’s shader work, we’re able to create a cohesive and stylized visual style for the game.

For example, take the Uzi—the primary weapon for our ranged variant. You can see it go through all three stages of our pipeline: I modeled and UV’d it, Jaden textured it, and then Ian brought it into the game and adjusted the shaders to give it our final stylized look.

When it comes to modeling, I start by talking with Ian and Jaden to get a clear idea of how they envision each asset. We gather a bunch of references, and from there I begin designing based on that material. This has been the core workflow I’ve used to create all the models in the game. Having the level blockout already done was a big help this week—it gave me a better sense of scale and layout, which made it easier to decide how the buildings should look and where they should go. I was in charge of creating several buildings to be placed throughout the level, and thanks to the collaboration with the whole art team, we were really able to bring the environment to life.