New zombie models in... and not so great sound effects of myself on audacity lol. Plan to replace these at some point. First dungeon pretty much done other than maybe doing boss rooms and the projectile effects of course. Oh and some music. Soo a bit less done than I thought but I can run around and beat up enemies so good progress!
Also work on the town has started!
Still a lot to add but looking pretty good so far. Travel time from one corner to the other is about 30 seconds. Wall texture looks a bit bad will consider updating that fairly soon. Next on the list fixing that character a bit more! She looks okay but lots of good improvements to be made still; and at this point they are bugging me enough to fix some now at least.
Stay tuned for more progress. Getting a bit of help lately from unity connect so hopefully some really cool stuff will be in the works!
Also, if you are interesting in purchasing models be sure to check out my website! Only golems and a house available at the moment... Unity is a bit slow accepting models. Probably going to switch over to turbosquid(which is where the house is).
I have a new site! If you care about the reasons why read on otherwise just look at pictures and go oh neat its like a 3D model yard sale.
Not all the links are working yet, but that is because I have to wait for review process to go through on the Asset Store.
So lately I have been thinking: you know, why do I have all my eggs in one basket when I can just put most of the stuff I create on the asset store while creating my games? That way even if an indie team fails or whatever I can be like its ok, can still sell what I made at least. One problem... I got over 100 models to package up and revamp since it took me so long to think of this *sigh. However, at least this gives me the opportunity to revisit them and tune em up with all the skills I have learned over the last couple years.
So in short I save time modelling and just spruce up textures or rig and I am good to go!
As for projects:
Mainly been working on my own game lately, here is a quick preview:
Lots of placeholder still, but have updated it some since this video. I have just been getting the new comp sorted and haven't got a video capture setup again yet. Also, looking for people to help out if you are interested. Know a bit of code or how to work in blender? Still a bit new? That is okay, practice some features or models on a project like mine! That is, if you like dungeon games and this sort of thing interests you. If not oh well just watch for progress I guess.
As for my other teams it is sort of dead to be frank. Not much news. I occasionally do stuff like this quest board:
However, until I see a bit more gameplay I am focusing on my own project and udemy/youtube learning again. Until next time!
Hah almost forgot about this blog. Been what? almost a month dang. Anyways a lot has been going on. Been working on armor, redesigning a house(3D model hah), that game I was building actually has a couple people helping out now! So without further ado here are some pictures:
Here I made a beginner armor set for AoA. These are just some basic textures for now. More detail is definitely something I am considering. Was able to set up a pipeline for Morph3D to our project without too much issue though I did have to e-mail them. What they said was very helpful and allowed me to quickly set up a blender>morph3D>unity asset pipeline.
As for the house it was really a re-texture with some slight model tweaks:
The roof doesn't look great but I figure the character won't be on it so it is okay unless I see something to convince me otherwise in the project. here is the old pic of it:
So a lot cleaner and better looking overall in my opinion even with these low res pictures.
And finally we have my project that is really starting to shape up! A nice little dungeon crawler scene shaping up in unity with a character running around and getting bombarded with tennis balls for now but eventually they will be actual weapons lol. Here is a screen from that:
Still loots of stuff to do but the basics are coming together nicely. That is all for now hopefully see you again for another update in a reasonable amount of time this time hah.
But that does not mean I have to slow down! Been taking another course on creating an RPG and learning some cool stuff. In short it basically teaches me how to get a 3rd person char moving around and playing a really epic game of dodge ball. This means I can at least prototype some levels with combat. Probably a good ways to go until it is a really smooth playing game but roughing it in is kind of neat here are some screens of that:
The second pic is more of a planning phase in what I might want to do with the character. Other than that I have just been messing with rigging and animation again. Current plans are to move forward with some dungeon/level prototyping which requires some model creation. That is unless my current projects get it in gear again lol.
I got the chance to revisit a couple models from my past and apply some improved textures to them. Neat to see how I have grown even in this amount of time. First up we have the ol handgun model which you may recognize from a previous update awhile back:
You can see the old model was a bit messy and the dirt patterns were pretty bad! It looks like a gun but close inspection reveals the flaws in the textures. Also, a specular map makes or breaks metal type objects imo. I did fix some flaws and improve the texture but what really improves it is the specular map bringing out all the dings and scratches in the metal that I tried to artificially add in the diffuse before.
Next up we have my player arms model being improved. There is a ton of detail in skin and the hand in particular. I still struggled a bit with adding it all but I am fairly happy with the result. I took some elements from my old maps and added some parts of real life pictures I took myself to make certain details really pop. Integrating it all in and making it blend well was the real trick:
Finally I am working on a new game with the knowledge I learned in that udemy course I took. Breaking it down into pieces and trying to make it work. The general idea is an RTS type game with units and gold to spend with map objectives to claim. Lots of placeholder stuff atm but a good start with purchasing units, placing them in a specific area only and also selecting them:
These last couple weeks I have been working on remapping/texturing a couple buildings. The first I actually created from scratch and it came out pretty good!
I did simplify it from the reference I had and removed some details to make it less churchy... Here was the reference:
Pretty close right? I may or may not add more details later but for now a pretty good building for our scene.
Next I reworked another model that just looked very drab and did not work well with normal maps or other maps for that matter. Just a too much on one map situation. Here is a picture of the rework:
It is interesting untangling someone's UV work. I am pretty sure most uv maps should be user friendly for others. I have learned how to lay out some really easy to use maps with Quixel's pipeline. So both myself and the program know where to place stuff a lot better!
Finally I am still working on that wolf model... we settled on a shape/model but are working with a new fur shader in unity so progress is slow while we see how that works exactly. Hopefully it will look awesome if not it is back to the ol drawing board.
All told a busy couple weeks. I also managed to finish the programming unity course I was working on and started work on a game but not much to say other than it is a kind of RTS type game. See you again in a couple weeks!
So I hit a couple snags with the wolf model which upset me a bit more than it should have but I had the world of programming to fall back on in the meantime!
I had a model like this:
Was looking really cool but in the end the look was decided to be a bit too fantasyish for our game. Which meant this model just gets tossed onto a shelf to gather dust. I gave it another go but ultimately my heart was not in it and I failed at creating a decent wolf for what we wanted. There could be many factors to attribute this failure to including no concept art and the team for letting it get to this stage before deciding it wouldn't work (I did send progress files as I went to try and prevent this outcome). Maybe I can come back to it after a break and try a new strategy (look at some unity asset store wolves perhaps) but for now someone else on the team is giving it a go.
I am continuing with the programming course and also doing some smaller models on the side. This was a good lesson, and I probably got too attached to my creation. When working with a group it is important to be flexible when you can and realize a lot of things may have to be redone quite often. Still I think the group should work to make sure as little has to be redone as possible as well.
Learned a lot about trying to refine work with this go around and look forward to continuing the indie game dev journey.
