Dave found some old screenshots & gifs from when we first started working on Bomber Crew, so I thought I’d share some of them here.

When we first started on Bomber Crew it had a 2D pixel art style. This didn’t last very long, as we realised it made it very difficult to see where enemy fighters were coming from.

We already had quite a lot of the game loop built in 2D – including giving orders, dynamic bomber damage, and more. For a long time during development X+ was still forward (not Z+, as you’d expect in a 3D Unity game!) – thankfully we did eventually correct this, because it’s a real pain working with X+ forward.

Above: Crew in their original 2D pixel art style vs the final 3D art style we ended up with.

This post is mostly going to be images, here’s some more – including the original logo:

And here is a little video we put together showing the switch from 2D to 3D. It’s a lot better in 3D!

Working on Bomber Crew was a lot of fun. We were really in the zone throughout development, completely focused – we built the whole game (excluding prototypes) in less than a year, which seems crazy to me now… (perhaps it did at the time, too). I did the console ports myself, which was really exciting & allowed us to make sure that all improvements from the console versions were brought back in to the Steam version, too.

Here’s one last image – this one is in 3D, an early prototype of our destruction system:

It looks pretty primitive compared to the final product, but you can see the basics of marking damage & holes on the bomber were there.

That’s it!