While we’ve been hammering away at our work-for-hire projects, we’ve also been steadily working on Trudy’s Mechanicals. Below you can check out a short compilation of our initial unit animations.

Since the game is played from a top-down pseudo-isometric perspective, the units are fairly low-poly. There’s also up to a dozen of them on-screen at any one time, along with numerous 3D props and visual effects, so we constantly find ourselves pushing at the technical limitations of the iPad.

The end result looks quite good, though, and I’m happy with our decision to use 3D models. We debated going with 2D “cutout” sprites — as is the norm with many tactics games — but eventually chose against it. A fully-3D environment allows us to properly implement dynamic lighting, and the 3D animations come out much smoother than simply using a handful of 2D frames. Our initial concerns with the animations not being as expressive as  in 2D also proved unnecessary, which will be even more evident in our next showcase!