Overhauling the visuals of my first 3D game!

Almost a year ago I began my journey as an indie developer with the release of C O Z M I C    B I R D Z, a locale multiplayer flying game with flying mechanics/physics inspired by minecraft's elytra. The core gameplay was fun enough (if I may say so myself), but my gosh were the visuals awful! 

But I prefer 3D over 2D in many  ways, and my lack of knowledge about 3D-art was really holding me back. I had no excuse either. Blender is free bitches! So I spent 2 months teaching myself 3D game art to upgrade the visuals.

I got my feet wet with the environmental design, shifting from a urban map to space-canyon things, cause I found that contrary to what I initially  thought, cities were a lot harder to pull off. We're just too good at telling when something is off about man made structures, and cities also are just too dense for one person to populate with items in a reasonable time. But rocks on the other hand just be big brawn blobs.

The finale, and probably more impactful part of the over haul was the cosmic birds themselves. Initially I named the game that just cause I got all the way to uploading the game and then realized I literally had no idea what the game was called. But as I moved on to other projects I did become fond of the idea of them being cosmic birds battling it out, and it always bothered me that they were just airplanes. 

Not much I can say here that wouldn't be better explained in video form, or by just playing the game for yourself. But I will say that I tried to also solve some design flaws through the new visuals. One huge problem with the base game was that it was difficult to actually find the other players in the huge map, and usually somebody would crash on their own before they found a single enemy! The planes were yellow, and the whole map was well lit with a yellowish sundown lighting. But cosmic birds glow, right?.. Well they do now! Now the birds are the only source of light in the game, so players can infer where each other are even around corners, which means that they spend more time actually fighting rather than searching. I think attaching light sources to players is also a great trick for creating a frame of reference for distance, like fog but more costly! But it does look cool as shit.