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.