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1. Concept
The idea of Lockdown Zone Wars came from my consideration of the reality of the world's overall decline, the return of ultra-nationalism and even racism, and the frequent conflicts, as well as my desire to combine ancient and technological elements from a design point of view.
Considering that 2D painting is not my main skill, I only use digital painting as an early way of determining concepts and a sense of atmosphere, as well as for the general design of props.
2. Game Design
My main reference is the Total War game series, with the main reference being Total War: Shogun 2, due to its more simplistic but mature system.
I've simplified the massive system of the reference game a great deal, such as limiting the types of troops on both sides of the battle to the 4 categories of the counterpart (9 in total, with the presence of a special boss unit), reducing the size of a single squad, which was originally dozens or even hundreds of units, to a maximum of 10 units, and limiting the map to a smaller symmetrical sector.
At the same time, I'm also adding special mechanics to the game that are different from Total War, such as the “Threat Level” system, where when the intensity of a battle reaches a certain level, boss squads transported by airplanes will enter the map and hunt down all the troops in the field. This not only adds to the strategy of the game, but also fits in with the game's worldview setting.
3. Art Assets Creation
The design and construction of the art resources was one of the most important aspects of this project, and I searched for extensive references for each of the props and thought carefully about the combination of various design elements (period, culture, genre, etc.).
After the initial design using digital painting, I used Maya to build highpoly models for the props, followed by retopology to reduce the number of faces. After unwrapping the UVs of the lowpoly model, I imported it into Substance Painter for baking, texturing and detailing.
For the characters, I used ZBrush (basic body in the beginning and detailed in the later stages) and Maya (props creation, re-topology) to create them, then added vertex colors to the highpoly models, and finally went into Substance Painter for baking, texturing and rendering.
I also wanted to reflect the facial features of the peoples to which both sides (nominally, since in the setting its all clones originating from the same genes) belonged, so I searched for a lot of reference images of Chinese and Japanese people. I don't expect them to look handsome, as they don't have the chance to take care of their appearance in the story.
4. Programming
I developed this project using Unity with C# scripting and (possibly in the future) some plugins.
I first documented and analyzed the operations and unit logic of my reference, Total War: Shogun 2, created different diagrams for the logic, and then simplified and customized them for my own needs before implementing them in the engine. For original special mechanisms, I will also create diagrams before trying to implement them in the engine.
However, at the moment I have paused the creation of diagrams, as there are often structural adjustments to the system in the early stages of production that would have cost me a lot of extra time in diagram creation.