Stylized 3D Environment top down prototype scene

I’d like to share my new personal project.
Stylized 3D environment prototype that I created in my free time.

The scene is set in a top-down camera view and inspired by games like Disco Elysium, ZERO PARADES and Rue Valley. It’s a small slice of a world inspired by 90s America.

I built the scene in Unreal Engine, using Blender, Photoshop and Substance Designer along the way. I also spent a bit of time working in Figma to collect references, organize my thoughts and set clear goals for each stage of the process.

For this prototype I created a texture atlas for unique props and built tileable textures in Substance 3D Designer. The main base color is blended with a secondary albedo texture by a specific mask. The second texture adds more characteristic shapes specific to each material and is mapped in a second UV channel. I followed the same approach for the roughness maps. I also used a metallic texture, because I feel it adds more depth and subtle variation to the scene. I also used a lot of decals and copied normals on grass and rubbish elements.

This scene works as a prototype that could define a future 3D game production. It helped me estimate what techniques I would use, how many models would be needed and what kind of textures would support the visual direction.

Pre-production is one of my favorite parts of game development. It allows me to focus on composition, color and experimenting with different ideas and solutions.

This time I decided to go for a more stylized direction, since recently I’ve mostly been working on realistic projects.