Low poly
Volume is built from a few flat faces. Each face has one color, light is the difference between faces, and edges stay faceted.
Traits
- Allocate faces to the main silhouette and keep a consistent simplification near and far
- A highlight can be a brighter face rather than a soft glow
- Without textures, routes and large landforms stay clear
- Hills, trees, and buildings can be generated by rules
Play that fits
It suits exploration, light driving, and aiming a parabola. Players read paths and volume, not ornamental texture.
Reference games
Make a coherent game art set
Suggested asset specification
- Character: clear masses and silhouette
- Scene: consistent facet scale
- UI: geometric icons with flat readable text
Motion and feedback
Check facet values during camera rotation; motion should communicate direction first.
Main production effort
Models, collision, animation and lighting remain production tasks despite lower polygon counts.
Start with this small scene
One small character, five terrain pieces and three props using a few large color fields.
Simplify for a smaller budget
Lock one camera and sun direction, reuse modules and simplify character rigs first.
What to check
Do facets obscure the route, and is facet scale consistent across near/far objects?
Take the art specification
Includes localized visual rules, asset suggestions, scope and sources. This is a specification; assets still need production for your project.
Art specification v1 · Original editorial and examples · Reference-game assets not included
Prompt examples
Low-poly floating platforms, flat-shaded triangles, grass green and sand, hard edges, no textures, soft daylight, a clear path, no text
Low-poly night market, tents made of a few planes, warm lamps and a cyan sky, crisp edges, no textures
Common pitfall
Low poly has no universal face limit; simplify for the image and device budget.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- ASTRONEER
Observe terrain masses and color regions without inferring a fixed polygon budget.
- AER Memories of Old
Observe how island, tree and mountain facets communicate distance.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Make a low-poly golf game: land the ball on a floating platform in three shots. Build the land from large flat faces and hard color edges, with no textures. Drag to aim and set power.
Related entries
Voxel
Small volumetric cubes build forms with stepped outlines. Consistent scale and readable large shapes matter more than dividing every surface into extra blocks.
Volumetric brushwork 3D
Brush-like marks and loose color masses help form spatial volumes with open, painterly edges. This describes a visual result, not one shared rendering technique.
Cel shading
Form is reduced to a few deliberate light steps, like an animation cel. Color stays clean, and the shadow edge is a designed shape.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.