The rendering of the die

Several people have asked me how the die was created so I decided to make this devlog to explain it.

At first I thought I could just draw and animate it by hand but I quickly realized that would be insane. I then got the idea of creating a 3D model of the die and render it to look like it was drawn pixel by pixel.

To do this I made the die 12 units wide with a 1 unit bevel to match what I wanted in pixels. This seemed to work very well in Blender.

In my player scene/object in Godot I added the 3D model and an orthogonal camera at a 60 degree angle inside a viewport that I had resized to 32x32 pixels, then rendered it using flat shading.

This framebuffer was then moved around like a normal sprite while some code animated the rotation of the 3D model inside the viewport in real time.