Lots of new stuff going on over the last couple weeks.

This first set of things is a set of supplies for a game project I am working on with a group. Just some tools and food that a player can pick up.

The other project I am working on has re-tasked me to creating a wolf model of which I have almost got the basic model hammered out:

Next up with that is cleaning up the edge loops a bit and simplifying the model to cut the poly count. Lots of stuff to do! I find myself looking back and being pretty impressed with what I can do now vs what I could do when I started with these projects. Still a lot of things to learn and improve but even flipping back a few pages in this blog and then coming forward again it is cool to see what changes.

Will try to keep the progress updates coming! See you again in a week or so!

Whew tons of birthday stuff going on. People ask you: how does it feel to be whatever age this year? Pretty much like any other day, aging is slow enough to be hardly noticeable to the person aging I think hah. However, I do wake up and wonder where all that teen or even early 20s energy went sometimes. As for work, just working through lists with similar assets to those in the previous posts. Hopefully I will create my own library of that stuff, back it up, and just be able to re-use some of it later!

My friend dropped by and hung out for a bit, we brainstormed some game ideas. It is pretty easy to come up with some silly ideas, implementing them is the challenging part; since most of us are more programmers or artists and not often both. There are tons of tools out there to help, but it still is a daunting task to take on alone at times.

Overall a slow couple of weeks, but at least projects are still ongoing at this point!

This week I continued practicing textures and creating more stuff for the interior of one of my projects.

But what is really interesting to me is the talk of creating games in one of my facebook groups. A game called Wizardry Online shut down in the US a year or so ago, and ever since we have all kept in touch and tried to find another game to play together. Thus far that goal has not come about, so there is now talk of perhaps creating our own game. I warned them an MMO is probably a rough place to start, but it is an ultimate goal of mine to create one, especially if it is inspired by Wizardry Online which is basically like Japan's take on Dungeons and Dragons Online.

I have discussed my thoughts on this in a previous post, but I feel that a lot of dungeon games are missing something these days. Dungeons feel like stepping stones and not really an integral part of the game one visits frequently, especially in an MMO like world. Wizardry got around this by making the dungeons the only place to go outside town. Whats more, you often go back to previous dungeons to help friends or do quests that might be needed to change your chars class. You might even run into an old enemy doing the same which adds spice to the whole thing. On the flip side the lack of a truly open world has its own effect of confining chars to closed in dungeons and dark places. Still, I do like how it was set up overall.

Anyways, hopefully we can bring something similar to Wizardry back in the US for this group. If nothing else at least we can have fun trying and designing.

Some more random stuff this week:

Lots of random furniture basically. I am actually pretty happy with how fast I can create this sort of thing now. Still not quite as fast as the videos I watched, but compared to before I can map a lot more efficiently and make something that works pretty quick. Most of the projects I join may not seem to amount to much, but I have been learning better modeling/texturing techniques at least.