Dovecote: the turning tower

The Defold Lab's first 3D piece, and its first asset built to be LOADED as geometry rather than rendered to sprites. The written art-direction contract this cycle worked to — the image generator is still out of credits, so twenty colours are committed as exact hex (left); the turntable of the SHIPPED .glb files (centre), eight even azimuths of the storey drum, its slate-on-timber stair, the cap and hatch, the vane, the headland with its drystone wall and sea edge, and the clockwork winder who walks the ledges; and the same tower live in Defold (right). Two things here are worth stealing. The model carries NO colour texture at all: each face's UV encodes an index into the contract palette, and the palette is compiled into the fragment shader as a constant array — which is also why the palette lives in exactly one file, because an ordered list where POSITION carries meaning will silently repaint everything if two copies drift apart. And the geometry that took the most rounds was not detail but clearance: the winder read as a lump until he was roughly 3:1 tall-to-wide, and floated until the ledge was made wider than he is. Download the whole tower kit below.