Retropolis City Builder: A Pack of Isometric Buildings

Having a fair amount of experience in creating isometric buildings for our clients’ city-builders, we decided to make our own set of isometric urban buildings sprites. Retropolis city builder is RetroStyle Games‘ new project, currently ready to download and implement in your game!

The genre of city-building games is construction and management simulation (think SimCity, Anno 2205, Cities, Frostpunk, and Skylines). Most of the players get excited and competitive about the growth and prosperity of the city they build, but many also enjoy creating a specific aesthetic or investing in the quality of living of the city. These games are especially alluring to the players who crave the opportunity to realize their vision and build the city of their dream, “make it right”, so to speak.

The oldest game in this genre was created in 1964, when there weren’t really that many games, which indicates that we as humans definitely have a thing for planning and building stuff. These days, city-builders come in all shapes and sizes, many drawing from a specific theme, like a historical period, a mythological era, a futuristic setting, or even a prison. Most city-builders have economic management components, and many add the strategy element as well.

We researched many city-builder games and put together a collection of references. Megapolis, specifically, served as the reference point.

The city we built has close to 43 unique buildings. We included both ordinary buildings, such as a cafe, a church, an airport, a shopping mall, and more interesting, industrial sites, such as a power station, an oil refinery, a television tower (our beauty), a spaceship launch site, a cargo harbor with ships, etc.

All houses in your city are optimized as much as possible. Such optimization has an impact on the game’s performance in particular, increasing its speed capabilities.It was also important for us to work out all possible options for the construction process. Of course, everything starts with the foundation, and then each building grows and rises until it is completely ready.

Moreover, all of them have four levels of complexity and different styles: with each upgrade, the building becomes more detailed and luxurious, or retro if you want.

• Well organized and ready to render 3ds max scenes with fully customized Corona Renderer 7 materials applied on each building.
• High-quality sprites in png format ready for quick integration into your engine.
• FBX with textures for use in other 3d software of your choice.

To streamline the process, we agreed on the following workflow: the artists would find great buildings that exist in real life, collect references of similar buildings with features that would enhance the main reference, do the blocking while analyzing shapes and details, and adjust the art depending on the feedback. We focused on creating interesting shapes and not boring exterior. We also pay attention to the palette: we want the colors of the buildings to be nice and bright without being acidic.

A lot of thought goes into the dimensions of the buildings: they need to have realistic proportions and go well together. We consider our buildings to be very detailed, but there is a balance there too: small details are not readable and only make the image busy, and large ones look cumbersome. There is a lot of checking the art in different software and settings to make sure all the buildings, cars, plants, and other objects have the right sizes and look great together.

We hope to release the game soon for a stock fee, and for now, here is what our work process looks like:

The development of visual aspects such as the backdrop, game items, and scenery requires in-game environment modeling. Our artists tried to make the world around you look harmonious and exciting. That is why we decided to create additional assets in the form of detailed roads, street lamps, flower beds, and many more cute details that make your city special.

RetroStyle Games provides outsourcing game art services and develops in-house games. Our artists create high-quality 2D and 3D game art along with other service lines, to help our clients with their projects. You can find more of our work here and if you like what you see, you can always contact us for an assessment of your project.

And, of course, don’t forget that you can purchase ready-made sprites for the isometric town builder at RetroStyle Games or asset stores now.

Feel free to contact us if you want to learn more about us.