🏙️ Creating a Knockout World: Behind the Scenes of the 3D World of Ka-Pow! City – Dev Log + Production Diary Notes

🏙️ Creating a Knockout World: Behind the Scenes of the 3D World of Ka-Pow! City – Dev Log

How did we pull off a 2.5D game concept? Beyond our incredible 2D sprite assets, we needed a 3D environment that brought everything to life. From the start, we wanted the game to feel smooth and optimised, which led us to create low-poly 3D assets for each of our in-game environments.

The world of Ka-Pow! City isn’t just a backdrop… it’s a living comic book battlefield. With insights from our amazing 3D modellers, Daniel Rzepecki and Jacobie Fiaola, let’s peek behind the panels at the creative choices behind each level.

🏢 The City Level

You can’t have Ka-Pow! City without, well, the City! This is the main environment where players explore and throw down…it’s their first taste of Ka-Pow! City.

The team drew inspiration from iconic game and comic book locations like Gotham City and Night City, along with real-world cities like New York. Daniel, who created the building assets, explained:

💬 Daniel Rzepecki: “My mind made a lot of associations with Batman and specific Marvel comic moments I’d seen. Since both also remind me of New York, I often looked up city and suburban locations, as well as New York-specific objects.”

But a city isn’t just buildings; it’s the little details that make it feel alive. Jacobie handled many of these:

💬 Jacobie Fiaola: “I enjoy creating street items and vehicles in low-poly. It was quite easy to get started, and I drew inspiration from other low-poly games and city-style projects that fit our theme.”

🚇 The Subway Level

What city doesn’t have a subway that doubles as a fighting arena?

The Subway is an unlockable level, available once players rack up a certain number of K.O.s. To sweeten the reward for players, the dev team included a score multiplier for this level.

The design drew heavily from real-world inspiration, especially Sydney’s Central Station. Players will encounter platforms, newsstands, graffiti, vending machines, train cars, and much more. This level is all about atmosphere, energy, and chaos.

🚧 The Vehicle Tunnel

The Vehicle Tunnel is a final battle arena with no exits, designed as the ultimate test of a player’s skills.

Unlike other environments, this one was kept visually simple to let players focus on pure survival and maximum carnage. It’s not about distractions…it’s about the fight. Similarly to the Subway Level, the dev team included a larger score multiplier to encourage players to push their limits and survive as long as possible.

⚡ 3D Hiccups

No project goes perfectly! Daniel and Jacobie shared some behind-the-scenes challenges and how they solved them:

💬 Daniel Rzepecki:

“For the most part I had no issues, but two things stood out:

1. A material issue when importing models from Maya to Unity (fixed by swapping the material type to Lambert).
2. A huge performance drop because I worked in M instead of CM. The poly count ballooned from 1–2k to over 500k, thanks to repeating models like gravel and tactile pavement. The fix was to export them as separate models, but I should have made separate scenes for each level’s assets to avoid the bloat. Luckily, no crashes or data loss!”

💬 Jacobie Fiaola:

“I barely had any problems, just some models not exporting correctly. That turned out to be a normals issue, and once fixed, they imported fine.”

🎨 Post Processing

Once the assets were imported and the levels set, our in-house Post Processing Extraordinaire, Lance Dean, added additional touches to bring the environments to life. This included shaders, volumetric fog, emission materials, and other post-processing effects.

👀 Wrapping Up

The 3D assets of Ka-Pow! City set the stage for every punch, kick, and combo. From city streets to underground subways and chaotic vehicle tunnels, our low-poly comic book world is designed to be playable and packed with personality.

Stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes looks at how we’re building a city worth fighting for!