The Frontier on Canvas - Dev Blog

Howdy, partners!

Undoubtedly, part of the charm of Wild West Pioneers isn’t just its modern spin on city building, but the western setting itself. During our playtest, this came up time and time again when we asked what you enjoyed most.

Safe to say, you’ve got a soft spot for the frontier, and so do we!

While many of you connected with the atmosphere of the demo, and we are happy for that, you also noticed that we used AI in some of our processes, like character assets or voiceover placeholders. As part of our ongoing improvements, we’re moving away from that approach and focusing fully on a handcrafted, artist-driven direction going forward.

That’s especially true for the characters, so we’d like to walk you step by step through how their new visuals come to life.

From the very beginning, our goal is simple: to make you feel like you’re not just playing, but watching a story unfold in the Wild West. Finding the right visual style to support that wasn’t straightforward. We explored several approaches along the way, including fully 3D characters with hand-painted textures. While we felt that something was still missing, it helped us realise that using 3D models as a base makes the work of our artist much easier.

So we stuck with it, but instead of applying textures directly to the models, we started drawing on top of them.

What you’re seeing now is a shift toward a more hand-crafted, illustrated approach. If it feels a bit like a comic, that’s intentional.

The style takes inspiration from 90s and early 2000s comics, especially in how shading is handled. One detail our artist Paweł particularly enjoys working with is halftones. It’s a classic technique where shading is built from small dots rather than smooth gradients. It gives the image a slightly rough, printed texture and helps break up clean digital surfaces, and brings a bit of imperfection, which fits naturally with the kind of world we’re building.

This approach helps us push the tone in the direction we are aiming for. While the style leans into comics, it also brings in a more weathered, grounded look that is closer to what you’d expect from life on the frontier. That was one of the ideas we felt strongly about following.

Earlier versions felt too polished, and that didn’t match the world we’re building. They lacked that sense of wear and history.

To top it all off, with our approach, we’re drawing from a wide range of references. From well-known Western games to real postcards and photographs from the era. You’ll see it in the shapes, the clothing, and the environments, all coming together to create a world that feels more lived-in.

We hope that you enjoy the first look at the new hand-crafted visuals of Wild West Pioneers!

Let us know in the comments.

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