Today we’re taking a deep dive into the making of POLYGON Palm City, an expansive, stylised, low-poly 3D asset pack filled with buildings, characters, props, weapons, vehicles, FX, and environment assets – everything you need to create the modern, city, or heist game world your heart desires in Unity or Unreal Engine.
Palm City is a lively, coastal city with a beach, city centre, art deco inspired main street, Mediterranean-style mansion, and golf club. On the busy beachfront you’ll find a skate park, a bustling boardwalk, a variety of shops, an outdoor workout area, and a pier – all teeming with activity. The vibrant city centre is complete with high rises, a parking building, and a monumental art deco tower. Step out onto the main avenue lined with an array of art deco shops and apartments before taking a spin on the iconic ferris wheel. Just outside the city centre you’ll find a Mediterranean-style mansion and golf club, where Palm City’s most colourful characters head to relax and unwind.
We chatted to Joel, Concept Artist at Synty, about the process of bringing Palm City to life!
Where do you find inspiration?
“At Synty, the process for gathering inspiration is different from pack to pack. Some packs are very specific, for a very specific purpose, so we look at very specific references. With Horror Sci-Fi for example, we looked closely at the Alien franchise as the main inspiration. With a pack like Palm City however, the environments were always going to be quite varied, so we needed a range of different reference points.”
Unlike most of Synty’s packs, Palm City is semi-based on a real location (Miami), so during the concept phase, Joel used street view on Google Maps to travel around and gather reference. “It was great to be able to find inspiration for the larger forms, like buildings, down to even smaller things like street signs and rubbish bins. Because Miami is famous for its Art Deco architecture, we checked out a bunch of Art Deco references so we could create Synty’s own version of everything. It was also a great way to differentiate the look of the buildings in Palm City from the other modern city packs in the Synty library.”
The team also looked at a variety of other media such as the Grand Theft Auto series (which was an obvious reference point for this pack) as well as action movies from the 80’s and 90’s like ‘Wall Street’ to flesh out some parts of the city. “The 80’s and early 90’s aesthetics were quite a big inspiration for the pack, especially when it came to the 2D decals for the street and skateboard art. The mixtures of bright neon colours and chunky graphic designs used during that era are super fun!” Joel adds.
Street art you can tell your Mum about
“With concept art, it’s all about trying to create a coherent world. Each element needs to feel like it fits,” says Joel. At Synty, each new asset pack has a theme, which becomes a brief, and typically Joel’s job is to create artwork that meets that brief whether it’s through some particular design language or just dreaming up assets that fit the particular ‘vibe’. But for this pack, he says things were slightly different… “What you don’t normally get to draw is skateboarding dinosaurs, geriatric ghosts, or a turtle tank all in one pack.”
The concept street art ideas were one of Joel’s favourite parts of working on Palm City. “It’s just an opportunity to come up with some completely random thoughts and include them. I could have literally made these forever. The new street art decals are a great way to add pops of colour and some pizazz into the Palm City environment that could have been a bit blank otherwise. They ended up making the city feel way more alive and lived in.”
For Joel as a concept artist, it was also very exciting to create production assets that made it into the final release. “Normally concept art is taken and turned into amazing 3D models by our talented team, so it’s harder to explain to people ‘I made the thing, before it got turned into that thing.’ In Palm City, I can point to the street art and tell my Mum, "I made that thing!”
Using concept art to get team buy in
One of the toughest challenges the team face when beginning to concept any pack is thinking what can Synty add to this genre? How can we do something different? We never want to create a new pack for the sake of making a new pack, and we always want to ensure we are bringing something new to the table!
In the pre-production phase, the concept team is thinking about the developers who will utilize this pack, and also trying to sell their ideas to the rest of the team of modellers. Every new pack needs to have buy-in from the whole team so they can do their best work, and if it’s just a bunch of brick walls, or a standard station wagon, it’s just not going to be as fun to work on. Additionally, after producing more than 70+ POLYGON packs, we are working hard to create new and interesting assets that don’t already exist in our ever-increasing library.
Sometimes all it takes is a concept or two that gets the team excited about the direction, and then you can expand out from that. For Joel, the Palm City concepts that got the team on board with his vision were the crab themed restaurant ‘Shell Yeah’ and the monster truck with the hot tub in the back. “I think they both pushed the overindulgence and excess vibe we were trying to give to the city, and a level of cheesiness and humour that I think Synty really does well. If the asset name isn’t a pun, are you even trying, bro?”
We hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek behind the curtain on Palm City. If it's inspired you, you can see all the screenshots, as well as pick up both Unity and Unreal Engine files on the Synty Store.
We can't wait to see the projects you build with this pack! Be sure to tag Synty on Instagram, TikTok, X, Bluesky, or Facebook when posting your work, and if you enjoyed this post, we’d love for you to join our community of experienced and aspiring developers on Discord.
