It was my task to create a sword game asset based on existing concept art for my internship admission. I chose André Kent's (https://www.artstation.com/kent2d) amazing swordtember concept "Starry Night" for that purpose.
The asset had to be under 4000 triangles and have 2K textures - for this post, I'm using the 4K textures though.
Since the different floating portals all look the same, I could get away with using instances and save triangles to capture roundness where it was needed instead.
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I used Blender for modelling, lighting and rendering. For baking and texturing, I went over to Substance Painter.
My procedure followed a classic high-poly to low-poly workflow found in the games industry.
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Unrelated to the internship test, I played around with the Kuwahara filter in Blender's compositor and Grease Pencil's lineart modifier to give it a more painterly look. This can be seen in the first image and the last.
Turnaround with obnoxiously many twinkles :D