How It's Done — SWORD Unit 190
We’ve long had the idea to create a robot in the spirit of classic mecha anime. The main challenge was that our robots don’t have “arms.” Yes, there are exceptions like Kid or Aether with Nether, but their “arms” are more like weapon platforms.
The legendary mecha designer Kunio Okawara — often called the Father of Mecha Design — helped us find a solution. Okawara-san agreed to design our new robot in his signature, recognizable style.
According to our game designers’ original concept, the robot called SWORD Unit 190 was supposed to be able to fly and wield a sword for close combat — something we had never done before, since we didn’t have melee robots in the game until now. Here's how we created it.
Written by Konstantin Kuzmin, Lead Technical Artist at Pixonic (MY.GAMES).
We’ve long had the idea to make a robot in the style of classic mecha anime. The main issue: our robots don’t have “arms”. The legendary mecha designer Kunio Okawara, often called the Father of Mecha Design, helped us solve this problem
Originally, our game designers wanted the robot to fly and wield a sword for melee combat — something we hadn’t done before, since melee robots didn’t exist in our game until now. We called the new robot SWORD Unit 190
Here's the Special version of SWORD Unit 190. Also 190 means that it's the 190th robot in our game
Besides the robot itself, Okawara-san also designed the weapons and drone, as well as remodel versions. He delivered sketches pretty quickly — from line art all the way to fully colored versions
Colored version of SWORD Unit 190 by Okawara-san
And here's the colored version of Special edition robot
Colored drone and weapons
Since Okawara-san draws the old-school way, using liners and markers, we made 3D models from his concepts to confirm everything matched the original design perfectly and had no inconsistencies
Early 3D versions of drone and weapons
After the approval we created the main model
And here's a textured version
The animation part turned out to be one of the hardest parts of the whole collab. The sword strike took the most time — we had to solve multiple art and game design challenges, as melee hits were totally new for us. Here's one of the iterations
The final result: SWORD Unit 190 in all its glory!