Work updates

While I was caught up on things it seems a model got lost and was never sent to us awhile back so I had to start it over from scratch. Still it was a pretty cool concept I was working off of. Here is the pre-texture version:

And some initial textures, I think I need to scale them up to make the details pop a bit more though:

Still, looks pretty good from far away! Quixel makes testing textures a lot quicker as well. As the year draws to a close I am happy to have come far as a 3D artist, but still realize I have a lot to learn as well. The other cool thing is I am starting to learn some programming concepts and even make some quick games. However, I am still a little impatient to get a nice project out there that more than 20 or so people see and download. Just got to keep learning new things and ranking up the projects as I do so, and hopefully my teams do the same!

Near years end!

I can definitely say I grew a lot in my skills this year. I can even say my workflow for 3D modelling changed entirely and probably for the better. For these last couple weeks I finished up quite a few things from the usual props to larger projects like a memorial and re texturing a cabin.

Here we have the memorial setup... You should recognize the statue which sits in the center, was finished a while back. This is just what I imagine it might look like, but I also have a clean platform for any changes we might wish to do.

For the other project I rigged up some arms in blender:

Might need a bit of refining when it comes to weights but for the most part looks like it will work.

I also revisited an old model to apply textures with Quixel and up the detail some:

Looks a lot cleaner than before and less fuzzy. Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out. The textures are better organized too so if we do decide to change stuff it will be a lot easier.

A decent amount of work done the last couple weeks! Looks like I even caught up on all the work and am mostly on standby until someone needs some more models. In the meantime I plan to keep following a udemy programming course and see if I can't get a little closer to getting a nice 3D prototype of a game I have on my mind. It will be inspired by some other games I have played but just some general setups. The story and design would be unique. To truly finish it will take a bit of luck and hopefully finding others to help move things along but I think a good starting point might help with that too. Or it could just be another crazy dream but meh those are the best anyways.

more houses, new text game!

Alright right on time with a two week update! I finished a couple more houses with some very basic interiors and exteriors, but that can be spiced up with props and textures.

I have gotten to the point where I can do a model like these and map it within a day which is pretty cool. As for textures I will probably make or get an atlas at some point. For now a set of base models will do. A lot of neat things happening with that team so be sure to stay tuned to the AoA facebook page or forums for updates.

Next up I created a text based game with the help of a Udemy course. Their story did not have tons of endings, a shop, and four character paths though lol. Check it out at game jolt

A lot of the text parts were pretty easy once I got the format down. It was basically like filling in a text bubble. You had to check the space available and shorten things but each bubble could be connected in before anything was written. Knocked this out in about 4-5 days, but still probably some mistakes here and there. Let me know what you think if you got a few!

Anyways that is about it for this update, hope you all had a good thanksgiving and see you again in a couple weeks!

Work updates

These last couple weeks I have been working on quite a few things 3D model wise. I have gotten a lot faster and actually managed to get ahead of my work for the most part now. There are still a few items on the backlog, but I am going to wait on those and work on some programming courses in the meantime. What I want most of all is just to see more prototyping of the games I am working on. I know it can't be that hard because I have been learning how to code stuff and I can get at least some sort of playable game fairly quick... I think these teams focus too much on making really high quality work and just get nothing done because of it. Yeah quality is important, but getting something playable even if it fails or looks a bit rough around the edges will teach you a lot. If the base game is good support should be pretty easy to get. Anyways enough of my rambling and on to work screens! I took these in unity just as import tests... some other random buildings there too:

this is a old wood cabin model with some furniture. Worked with blender and Quixel to set it all up. Quixel workflow is actually pretty nice to let you know where everything is with color codes and also has a good library of textures to apply. Even has a normal map creator! I do not regret learning this program so far!

rocks, stumps, hospital sign. These will help fill out some scenes. They are in front of a church model that is still in progress.

some docks that finally got textured. For AoA, so the textures are supposed to be a bit less realistic here. We even got some ships to put around it! For more updates or screens of that game just go check out the Age of Aincrad forums or facebook page.

See you again in a couple weeks!

Whoops I went and forgot to post again

I tend to get busy and buried in my work and just general things sometimes. I really should keep this updated a bit better but alas correcting a should have is often impossible. At any rate lets kick this off with what I have been up to:

As you can see a lot of houses in the works. Just models to fill out towns and neighborhoods really. Quixel is making texturing a lot quicker, though we still have some kinks to work out of textures overall. However, I am happy to report that we are moving more towards a dev art mindset than having everything be perfect as we create. Graphics might not be top notch, but at least we can get an actual game in the works a bit faster hopefully. It only took me a couple years to convince them to try that approach!

We are also talking a bit about GDC but it probably wont be this one, maybe the next though. I would love to meet the team in person and I think it is a necessity at some point to do so! Things are still moving pretty slow, but hopefully with these new ideas of doing things we can move forward quicker and get a game produced! In the meantime I keep kicking out models and learning a bit of programming on the side. Sometimes I get a little burnt out and turn to the games or side projects, but I think breaks are important to keeping your head up and continuing to move forward.

Until next time.. hopefully not a month this time between posts!

This last week I have been learning quixel and I think I got the basics down. I can set a model up and use the program to apply textures quickly. Quixel is great for being able to change textures on the fly and add a lot of small details quickly with masks and a fairly good library of textures. Still I did run into a couple crashes and one annoying thing: it kind of sucks at updating a model. Like if you set it up a little wrong with material IDs and need to reload an update it tends to fail at that. The set up is key and I would say double check it.. but even if you have to reload applying textures is so smooth it almost doesn't matter time wise if you have to restart from scratch (as long as you haven't gone too in depth in making really unique materials). So I would definitely just keep textures in a draft form until the model is fully textured to make sure everything is working how you want before you get into the small detail work. So here is my first quixel result, with a couple of my own textures and some of the built in sets as well:

Other than that I have been finalizing Sundered Arvena and renamed it to Knight Quest just to make it a little easier to find and remember. Overall The game does not seem too popular. I think the main mistake I made was making it too hard from the start. You open the game and right away you are bombarded with enemies. Which would be fine, but I could see how it might get frustrating pretty quickly. From my standpoint I like the challenge, but I suppose a lot of people might find it very discouraging. The other theory I have is maybe the combat just isn't fun enough. I mean you tap and stuff dies but that is about it... I don't have any cool skills or powerups. So that aspect may be too simple. Even Mario has to hit an enemy a certain way to defeat it or have a certain powerup.

That is about it for this update. I am thinking of some other game ideas to try and implement and also keeping up with my other two projects. See you again in a couple weeks!

It starts with a single game

Alright, been a bit since my last post, here is what has been happening: Tried to get feedback on my game and didn't have a whole lot of luck; though I did get suggestions that I successfully implemented. It has been an adventure optimizing and updating the APK to have no issues with google play but looks like everything is set. I can't say it has been a successful project, but I did learn a lot and it is a game out there which is farther than I ever went before. The first time I attempted to launch a game on the app store it was a few years back and it never got past a prototype stage (a lot of that due to a programmer bailing on the project and me not being in the right state of mind to learn programming at the time).

So in short it seems the game is a success and failure at the same time. For me personally it is a big success, but in terms of the world at large not so much hah! I did upgrade it to production recently, and had to change the name due to an issue. You can find it here: Sundered Arvana
please click on some ads if you get the chance!

After I finished that journey I decided it was high time I learned Blender. It may not be industry standard, but it just fits my needs as an indie dev on a budget  better. I tackled a heck of a first project for it though: Goddess statue
I am fairly happy with the progress, and have since started work on textures.

Future plans are probably to focus more on my own personal projects/learning until I see more progress from the people I am working with. It seems working with people who have a lot of other stuff going on is a lot of stop and go in terms of game development progress. It gets a bit disheartening to toss hundreds of models at a project and see not a whole lot in terms of an actual game. Ah well time to put this book to a close, stay tuned for more on the journey to becoming a pro game developer/3D artist!

New game released!

Huh I thought I was posting a bit early but turns out it isn't far off the mark! So to get right down to business I would like to present my newest game: Sundered Arvena.
Feels good to say that... I have something that works people can play it! Hopefully the start of many. Yes I know it a good bit of issues to sort out still, hence why I put it beta for now. Hopefully I can work it out and make it a full release fairly soon. The last couple weeks have been spent mainly testing and getting it working as well as I can at my current skill level.

Rest assured.. despite some issues this game IS winnable. There is a start and a finish! Hope it doesn't frustrate too much. I meant it to be a challenge but I might have gone a bit overboard.

More creations!

Lots of project jumping these last couple weeks. I am close to just putting other work on hold and finishing my own game but the teams are important too. So I do the whole juggle bit hah! Anyways on to the pictures of progress!

We saw the church exterior in the last update but this is some of the interior roughed out with some placeholder textures and materials. Still a work in progress as I need a bit more info about it from the project lead to finish it off.

Next up is some more AoA stuff; a lot of small stuff rather than any buildings or characters:

These are market stalls and overhangs meant to fill some spaces and give the city in progress a bit more life and style. feel free to head on over to facebook for more detailed information on the teams work thus far on said city!

Finally I even got some work done on my own game. The base game is almost done, after that it is just a bunch of polish work and maybe adding some extra features like a death counter, maybe a compass drop. Here is a pic of the final level before you enter the last dungeon!

Just a couple more monsters and the dungeon and that game is basically done and playable. After that it is making a good icon, title page, polishing up anything that looks off, then researching a bit how to add it to the play store and maybe put a windows version somewhere as well.

See you next time in the usual two week update!

A bit late but lots of work being done!

First off, I did get caught up a bit in the Pokemon Go craze. I see both good and bad aspects of it. Good that it gets people out and about, but bad because how easy it is to become distracted or wander into a bad situation. Still, it is pretty neat.

As for my work, lots of animation and modelling going on. Also, have a sketchfab account now, so check it out for some neat models and animation! Still working on that whole animation thing, but got to practice and start somewhere I suppose.

Also some big news on a game front. We have a steam page! Not quite on the green light journey yet but getting some initial feedback. Check it out and catch a glimpse of the latest model with actual lighting instead of this default stuff:

sadly my own game has been on the back burner for a bit but I plan on getting to that a bit today and tomorrow.

Updated model, other progress

So today I am going to talk about another model I came back to for the third or was it fourth time? *dramatic sigh lol. The reason this has been reworked so many times is I don't we knew exactly what we wanted. I was handed a concept art and initially told to follow that but I suppose seeing it on paper and then in actual 3D has a way of altering ones thoughts about it. I do wish I had a better concept or idea of what we were looking for from the start though. However, I will say, after a creature undergoes this many revisions you really do see the improvement:

Now this is not exactly how the model looks in game, as the lighting is different and there are a few more maps that really bring out those details. However, these are base textures which determine a lot in the end. Some really good details coming out here and I would say it is one of my better creations when it comes to 3D modelling so far.

Other than this creature not a whole lot going on. I did finish another prop, a canteen, but other than that it was a week or two of research and experiments mainly. The original plan was for that creature up there to have a lot of fur, but that is a bit beyond my skills at this time in my opinion. I gave it a good try but not really confident about it. In other news spider dungeon got finished and now I am on to the next one! AI and enemy moves are done now I just need graphics again. After that two more lands and the game will be finished! It will be my biggest project yet in terms of game creation with 6 main levels, each with their own dungeon and boss and three enemy types to fight in each area.

See you next time.

reworks and new lands!

The last couple weeks I have been reworking a lot of things not really because they were bad but they could be optimized. For example this group of things:

All this stuff is parts of a village, about 57 models and 27 textures. I atlased(combined a lot of textures into one file basically) these and made it 7 textures (3 2kX2k and some lesser sizes) which was great and only took me about two days. two mainly because of some uv errors and mesh optimization I did at the same time. A bit tedious, but definitely worth it and I cleaned up a ton of files as well by combining all this stuff into one.

Another item on the list of upgrades was our undead creature which was passed over to someone else for some cool model changes. Unfortunately this resulted in a need for re-rigging and remapping. But this presents on opportunity to upgrade the textures as well.

finally on the home front with my game I got a new land done! That means I am about halfway done with my game whoohoo!
Here is a small preview.. It is a close up to keep some secrets hidden:

Here I have added some cool stuff like destroy-able bushes and a slew of new monster spells of course. Look forward to more updates in a week or two as usual!

Swamped in work and everything

I don't know what it is about June this year but dogvacay stuff is just going crazy. A couple dogs is nice but when you get to 5 or 6+ guest dogs it can get a bit complicated lol. Anyways still managing to work on things and we are in the process of updating a creature but in the meantime the filler stuff multiplies:

That should be just about it for general house stuff though. I also am getting my game going a bit more. With this level it will be the farthest I have gotten. I have TWO bosses and dungeons! that is twice as much as my other forays! hurray for progress! The challenge now is just repeating the process a few more times and trying to keep things interesting but simple enough that I can manage with my admittedly meager programing skills. If you want to try out what I have so far here it is:
(links removed for now, sorry if you missed out!)
Now I will say this, it is still very rough around the edges. I need a lot of little changes to make it more fun and not absolutely hellish difficulty. The main thing making it hard is how I have my spawners set up. I may need to make a way to trigger them separately rather than all at once. Any other feedback is of course welcome. Keep in mind this is a single person project with someone who basically has to look up how to do most of the coding atm. So if you say: it needs a complex skill system with a bunch of cool moves I will go: uh sorry maybe next project or I will never finish this hah. Actually I am thinking about expanding on this and making a more in depth game but for now this will be a good start of setting up the little things like mob ai and player control/attacking. The main thing now is a small instruction page to sort of show save points and how to use them and the best way to attack(which imo is clicking on the knight character rather than enemies, but clicking on enemies aims you better).

Anyways sorry for the really long post. A lot of stuff going on and a lot of stuff in the works so to speak. See you next time I hope.

more props and a building

Things are still moving along pretty slowly, but I have got to the point where I can model and texture a prop within a day pretty easily which is nice. Here are some examples:

It took me awhile to find a good wood texture. For whatever reason getting a good image of all the detail wood has seems difficult and even with a texture site like CGtextures a lot of detail seems pretty fuzzy. After I find a good texture it is pretty easy to modify it and add details I need.

The other model I created was a building:

I am not sure if I am completely satisfied with the stone texture. Still, I think it came out pretty well for the style we are going for.

My own project is still getting put to the side while I think about some of the details a bit more and work on these models. It is quite a trick balancing play and productive work when all you have is yourself saying certain things need to get done! It is like a shoulder angel scenario, the good one is saying: Hey we need to do this model or learn this for our game creation! The bad one is like: nah man, play another game of league or do something in BDO, can always work on more stuff tomorrow. I have come to realize that the games are a good thing, as long as I don't let them take over entirely; they give some good ideas and references for my own games in addition to providing a social outlet in a very unsocial workplace setup.

work slowing down a bit as I consider how to move forward with my game and wait for teams to organize a bit more. Still, I did manage to get a simple prison done:

It should work for the purpose we need. I might add some more details later if needed but I have learned you want to keep it simple initially for feedback!

I also got to look over a cabin designed by another modeller and did some tweaks and adjustments:

It was nice working with something already mostly constructed, but it also showed me a bit how far I have come when I was fixing some minor issues. Issues I myself might have had, so I kind of had a system of how to look it over and fix them.

As for my game it is coming along nicely (have some enemies that shoot and attack the player, in addition to some environment details), but I am wondering if just killing monsters in dungeons could be fun enough. Adding inventory and loot seems a bit complex not to mention harder to balance the game if say a player finds a rare item and suddenly starts one shotting enemies. My goal is to make a set of challenging dungeons with just enough story to make one want to keep going and uncover things. I suppose I will just have to plow ahead and see what happens. Play test it and add more if needed, leave room in the maps for treasure and such.

Created an entire town!

Still struggling with the whole play too much and not enough creation time, but I have managed to impose some discipline and get things done here and there lol.

Here are some basic houses I finished. You can make some variations with that side piece but I went a little further and did one more:

By the end the people I was working with are like: Man you practically have created this entire town by yourself! Well, I try, I always beat myself up about not working enough but when I do work I seem to get it done pretty efficiently.

That is the bulk of what I have been doing. Still doing some odds and ends for the other game like cabinet animations and sinks and such. Also looking to get back to some character models a bit soon. As for my own game I got a lot of the world map pretty much laid out!

Ignore the really bad looking collision boxes, those won't be visible in the actual game lol. It is starting to come together nicely, though that cursed feature creep is trying to bog me down. I am like: alright lets get some more actual gameplay that I have planned out in before I go doing things like items, treasure, or more skills. I got a guy that can fight monsters for now, lets make more places to fight them and stuff!

Survived BDO

So I still managed to get some work done despite black desert trying to suck me in, I think I have it under control now lol. So here we have a dead person for one game:

Not too bad on the details though I feel I could clean it up a bit more it works for now. This got put off a lot due to distractions and various things just getting in the way. I also have a male version of the corpse on deck, but taking a break from it for a bit to work on more animation stuff.

Next up I came back to an old model and saw just how much I have improved. Talk to a project lead and show him this tavern I had shelved.

 He was like: I like it lets use it! Turns out it was shelved because of a lot of issues and I spent the rest of the day fixing them and optimizing/improving textures. The end result was much better and well worth the time imo:

 Still a lot of stuff going on, so look forward to more updates in a week or two!

Props and townhalls

Despite getting somewhat distracted by Black Desert Online (so much stuff to do in that game!) I am still chugging away on my various projects. The last couple days I finished up a town hall for one:

I think it looks more like a hunting lodge of some sort but this is the direction my reference steered me! Turned out pretty good I think, though the textures may have to be tweaked at a later date. The rock walls in particular may be a little too detailed for our style.

Next up still working on finishing up a props list. But I did get some suitcases done!

After that I need to create some dead bodies! er at least some virtual ones lol. I am unsure how to approach that but no time like the present to experiment. The two methods I am considering are simply creating them from scratch or just creating parts and combining them into a pre built mesh like makehuman provides. Modifying a pre built mesh does not seem to be the best idea. I suppose I could just treat it like creating an undead character. As for my personal project it is being pushed to the side again but I WILL get back to it. I have just hit a few snags in programming enemies. That is about all for the last couple weeks. See you next time I hope!

Alright although I have been a bit sick the last week or so I still managed to finish one prop list and the other is down to three items yay! Here are some of the last props:

The fountain came out pretty good if I do say so. The market place had a lot of minor tweaks I needed to do (I only re-textured a bit and optimized the models, someone else on the team did them originally). Which brings me to getting back to that other prop list today at some point hah.

Also, I have been working through that tutorial series still. On the last couple videos now. Definitely takes one pretty far down the path to making an rpg type game. Still need to find some supplement videos like how to make the main menu and maybe look at a skill system. At least be able to pick up new weapons or something. Still, even with what I have I could make a nice hack and slash romp at the very least. I look forward to finishing that project off and adapting my end plan to do so.

In other news I have also been playing some Black Desert. My short review: it is not a bad game, but it has more that open world sandbox feel a lot of mmos have these days. I miss my dungeons and early pvp hah. However, there is tons to do and I can see how a player could get lost quite quickly in such a game. See you next time, hopefully with some more realistic models to show off!

The endless list of props. Both projects! There has been a bit of a stall in progress in my projects lately. It is a bit disheartening to work on endless lists and not see any result other than:

Lots of somewhat interesting stuff but it isn't in game and doing anything yet! At least I can get stuff like this done fairly quickly. But it is like someone who is asking you to re-enact an air battle with 100 paper planes, start folding!

In the meantime I decided to set aside some time to a personal project where I can see everything coming together and what the end result is based on the plan I drew up. It is a nice feeling of being in control and the only obstacle to completion being myself for that one lol. I have been following this tutorial to get me started.

Great stuff and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a bit more about gamemaker and creating stuff in it. I am trying to adapt it for more a phone environment like an android but the rpg basics still apply.

Until next time, I will be creating more props, working on a 2D game etc... slowly grinding through the world of game design hah!

These last couple weeks I finished up our new hospital. However, the textures still are not quite what we are looking for.

It looks nice, just a bit too weathered. That will be put on hold while the person I am working with finds some references so I can better see what his vision for the level is. The layout is fine, though he did mention forgetting some details; that could be covered by other meshes though. Other than that I have went back and fixed some issues with my house variants. Small holes in the mesh or walls not quite meeting other walls. I am actually getting a good system down for checking that now at least!

All in all the buildings should be pretty well finished model wise (probably not all we need but enough for the early levels). The hospital took the longest seeing as it had to be recreated from scratch for this iteration. Better that than trying to modify the old version though. Better still would be having a well thought out plan for the level from the start so a redo is not necessary.

Other than that just working on some props for another game:

 just some torches and lamps and such for now.



 Also I am collaborating with a friend who wants to knock the dust off his programming skills. He was like: okay you won't pay me but I need to do something or I will never re-learn this stuff. Me: alright, I have like 2 or 3 design docs stashed away and even some sprites you can animate, which one do you want to run with? And away he went. Not much to report on that front yet, but be cool if something does get going! Unfortunately I still have a sinking feeling I will need to take some of these projects and at least start them myself hah. Ah well there is always Udemy or Youtube. Then it is a matter of deciding which engine... *sigh I just wanna describe stuff and have a magic programming genie make it work. I am sure I am not alone there hah.

About time I posted again... Today was a bit of a slow start as snow kind of stopped me from going anywhere for a bit. Thankfully a ride appeared in fairly short order in the form of a car I could use that was not stuck showing up.

Anyways, for the last week I have been remodeling, or rather entirely recreating our hospital level. It just didn't fit what we wanted to do with it. Which goes to show that one should probably not start work or tell someone to create something without a proper plan laid out! However, the old hospital was good practice and I still learned quite a bit creating it. I found I was a lot better at catching and fixing errors now. I also knew how to lay out the UV maps for a large building a lot better and faster. Here are some pictures of the new setup with some placeholder textures for now (in unity, default lighting and just a fps control to sort of stroll around and get a look at things):

There is a lot more space to move in, which I believe will make programming an AI easier in addition to providing more interesting interactions. More room is useful for dodging or better chase game play.

Still have the exterior to do, and revising textures, but that should only take about a week or so. So that is what is next on the path to finishing off this level. Well a building with a lot of empty space. We will need to create some more models to make it look a little less empty!

And for my conclusion here is a cow model I whipped up in a couple days:

Turned out pretty good for the style we are working with. A bit of UV distortion on the horns, but that could just be fur. Still have not heard back about PAX, just that they were reviewing submissions. But even if we don't make the cut I want to finish some games and get some stuff out there anyways! There will be plenty of opportunities to show up and demo our game somewhere. See you next time in a week or two!

Over the last couple weeks I have been improving one of my creatures that I created. Both textures and animations. I would like to take a bit of time to look at how this creature evolved from its initial concept:

Initially we had a pretty simplistic chubby ghoul like thing... It was very rough around the edges, but the idea was there. The thoughts were: you know, chubby works but emaciated would be creepier and fur is in the concept so lets try that! The result:

We were getting closer to the concept but it still didn't look very scary or anywhere near real enough for what we were going for. So the decision was made to get rid of all the hair and revamp the texture maps one more time. We also decided to get rid of the mummy head look. In the meantime I had been studying how things were done from asset packs found on the Unity asset store and had learned some more tricks. I had also gotten a better handle on the style we were going for which was closer to realistic than I had initially thought. The result:

Now this guy has a lot of detail compared to the original maps. He looks grungier and there is a lot of wrinkle and vein action going on. Everyone agreed this would be our creature at this time. I did experiment with sculpting some to try and bring out some more subtle details but that did not go so well this time around. There was already a lot of detail there, and more just got lost amid all the other details.

The animations underwent similar changes. Gradually refining to what we were looking for. Through the evolution of this character I definitely learned a lot and improved many skills along the way. Unfortunately most of my time was devoted to one project here, but hopefully I can scrounge some for the other one very soon. See you next time, and hope you liked the creature talk post!

The new year so far

Alrighty, lots of stuff been getting done despite the holidays, though it is mostly filler items to make the scenes look less empty in the game. Stuff like beds, tvs, playground equipment. You kind of don't realize how many little things are around until you move in an environment that just doesn't have them. Here is a progress screenshot of those items:

Still a lot left, but it is a good start. We also have some help from the asset packs we purchased as well. Progress on the game itself is going pretty well, stuff coming together and the world slowly coming to life.

Switched over to my other project, it seems things have slowed down a lot over the holidays. People just up an vanishing for awhile hah. Still, I look forward to seeing more things get implemented there as well. After all the work last year both projects have a lot of the groundwork for a game already in place. My modelling skills have advanced to the point I am thinking about my own game again as well a bit. Just got to hit that coding wall at some point and just start doing things. In the meantime here is a sheep:

I look forward to doing another creature model this coming week along with some more filler.