Kodai Tree // Stylized Environment | UE5 HD2D Project

Hi Stylized fans!

Kodai Tree is a personal environment project I’ve been developing over the past months, inspired by A mix of Asian cultural themes, hand-painted textures, and classic JRPG/HD2D retro aesthetics.

From the very beginning, the main question behind this project was:
“How are game worlds actually created?”

To answer that, I challenged myself to build a complete Stylized Environment/Level while learning a wide range of new skills throughout the process, including:

Hand-painted texture creation
Modelling & UV workflows
High-to-low baking
Tileable & trim sheet creation
Skybox creation
Material workflows in Unreal Engine 5
Blueprint scripting
Environment composition & modular construction

A large focus of the project was balancing painterly hand-crafted visuals with reusable modular assets and shared materials to create a cohesive, explorable game environment.

All textures were hand-painted by me in Krita before being brought into Unreal Engine 5 for material creation and lighting setup.

For the character sprite, I used Ryu from Breath of Fire IV as a temporary placeholder flipbook while exploring the HD2D retro-inspired direction. The top-down camera setup and movement foundations were originally built following Cobra Code’s Unreal Engine course:
udemy.com/course/unreal-2d-top-down/