Three times now the game has changed how it looks, and each time for a reason we could point at. This page keeps all of it, including the work that was thrown away. Every picture below is rendered from the game's own files — the project keeps the original of each model it replaced, so none of this is a reconstruction after the fact.
The first build was coloured blocks. A hero was a tall box, a collector was a grey box, a wall was a long box. That is not modesty, it is the order of operations: until you know the game is fun, art is a bet on something unproven. The fun came first and it passed, so the art followed.
The first voxel models were carved: an image was fed in and the shape was cut to match it. They looked passable in a still and wrong the moment anything moved, because a carve has no idea what a shoulder is. Every model below was then authored instead — built block by block from a drawing, with the reasoning written down. Left is the carve, right is the version that shipped.
For a few days in September this chapter was going to be a fourth rebuild. The argument was cost: a voxel model is thousands of little faces, and at the distance you actually play at that is a lot of triangles for detail nobody can see. The plan was to redo everything low poly and warm, keeping the shapes and losing the bill.
Then the voxel build got played for a week, every model got its sign-off in the game, and the plan was withdrawn. The blocky look is the game's identity. What changed instead was everything around the models: a higher, softer sun, shadows that keep light in them, animals that walk on legs cut from their own blocks. Polished, not replaced. This page keeps the abandoned plan because that is the point of the page.