Well in Vancouver, Canada bars tend to be less of the sort where you grab a few beers with some friends and more of the sort where you spend $24 on a cocktail and everything looks very new and expensive haha. I guess I was also thinking a bit about how these places tend to displace a lot of older neighbourhood spots and sometimes cartoonishly mimic them. A lot of the reference I used for the bar pieces included furniture and lighting from bars mostly in Vancouver, New York and London—I was thinking about the kind of place you might see in a big international city.
Thanks for the kind words about the centrepiece! This is pretty much just an art scene I’m afraid—if I were to set a game in this setting I don’t think I’d have the time or budget as a solo developer to build it out to this level of detail, but I needed a full environment scene for my portfolio and it was nice to play around with some of the new workflows in UE5 and see how far the engine can be pushed in a big interior space before performance starts to suffer (the scene gets about 25-40fps depending on where you stand, although it could be brought above a consistent 30 by reducing shadow-casting lights and being a bit more rigorous about instancing non-nanite meshes).