Hand Painting Textures.

I've decided that texturing is that I needed to address, As I felt my game is in a nice position but lacking any sort of visual feedback and art style.

So I started doing some textures for my ground just something that could be easily tileable. I have to fix the seams up.

I've also started hand painted the UV Atlas for my Victorian style building. It's slowly progressing. but here is a little update of it anyway plus some of the textures I've been using.

This is the cobblestone path I made. 

Wood Texture for boards, flooring. 

Some shingles, I'm not really happy with these doesn't fit with the rest of the style that I've made

Wood Boards for the walls. 

My cobblestone in the game.. I just need to fix the seams and make it truly tileable. 

My Hangman's Noose with the wooden board texture. 

Turning my atlas into hand painted textures all over 

3d printed a model.

Just a quick update about something a little different today. I sourced a company and just wanted to test the world of 3d Printed models. I think it's something that will really bring my game to life when I go to pitch it to people. So they can physically touch the characters/assets or whatever.

So as a sample tester I got one of the tree's that I produced in Z-brush a while back.

 The difference in 3d Printing is quite apparent once you think about it logically (something I overlooked), The models you produce need to be structurally viable, Be able to support themselves, not be to thin. Also having a base for the printer to start on is something that is essential otherwise the printer just starts with supports and doesn't have anything to support itself.

So here is the tree in all its glory!!

Holy shit, Stop the press. I think he finally Gets it. (A tale of struggle with UV Atlas)

Whoa whoa. A blog update. I've been a little bit slack about positing things lately. I've been getting frustrated with UV unwrapping and it's basically bottled necked my entire project just due to my brain and myself being retarded. But I finally understand how to do it. So that's good at least.

To summarise what a UV Atlas for mainly those people that don't understand, Is when you texture an object and import it into a game. When the player see's it with a texture on it, the makes what we call a "Draw Call" to establish the connection between object and texture. If you can fit multiple textures on what we call a texture atlas, it can cover more than one object and thus still only make the one draw call. The problem with multiple draw calls or an excessive amount of draw calls is that it can lag the users computer.

So in the last two weeks I've updated my greyboxing and doing it a lot more modular and doing my texture atlas.

Greyboxing Attempt #2. Going a lot more modular.

With a simple bunch of modular parts I build a simple castle/church. 

The atlas of simple textures that I will then modify and hand paint later. 

The struggle I had with UV atlasing, was more so understanding it. Simple things such as realising that Maya isn't like Photoshop. In photoshop if I make a 4k texture the canvas scales to 4k, In Maya the canvas resolution stays the same so 512 can look like 4k canvas. Confused the shit out of me!!

May Update, Greyboxing, Particle effects, UI Elements, Polishing Code.

I've been working and programming and modelling and animating and god only know what else.

I've built my game and started to make it come to life with particle effects so I can shoot some projectiles and interact with my models that I'm building. As well as adding box collides on models to start bringing in that physics engine.

Die skeleton.

You can see that my fireball reacts to surfaces and adds physics the fireball assets isn't created by myself, I don't really have any interest in making particles so I bought some to give me a little life to the game. 

Testing the colliders 

I've fixed the GUI so that when I cast a spell it consumes Mana, Health goes up and down according to if the player is hit or not. And the enemy health bar goes up and down according to the enemy's health.

Skeleton model not finished but I just wanted to something to shot at

Greyboxing

I've been learning about Greyboxing and I've bought this to the front of my game, as I know that this is going to be a big part of what I need to do. I've started researching city landscapes, road paths and styles. I've found a style that I'm hoping to achieve in Croatia streets. 

I

The idea of having a centre piece of church. Is something that makes sense. "It says oohhh gotta go there"

I very much like the style of tight streets and overhanging buildings. Also the lights gave me a fantastic idea of how to light my scenes. 

Importing UI Into the game

I've been struggling a little lately with my game development. Just a lot of little bugs that I didn't count for but finally got something to show!!

I've been working with the new GUI in Unity 5 and importing my health bar and mana bar in so that my character can take damage and spend mana.

I sourced a really good document and broke it down so that I could understand how UI elements work in relation to what the player can see here.
It helped a lot. I used a little of what the author did but changed a little bit to make it my own.

First we start with the graphic of the object we want in this case I wanted globes like my beloved Diablo game

Then we need some simple textures for what is going to be inside the object. I've chosen the classic mana blue and health red for my game. Later on I most likely will have energy and stamina as well. 

A simple Mask to hold the texture to the shape and translate it to how we want it to look in game.

And magic we have UI elements!!! 

Hopefully next blog entry I have my character up and running around. 

Character Update

Another week, another little step for progression on my own project.

I've committed to sinking my time solely into my own project, and getting a lot of passion about it and a great deal of fire. I'm planning that by this weekend that I'll have my character in my own game and ready to move around and animate. So exciting times. 

I think once I get my character into my game and I can physically see what's going on and what needs work. I'll be really happy and can easily start putting pieces together and start adding things that would make my game look a lot better.

Texturing once again eating a lot of my time. I keep having to remind myself that it's just a prototype at the start. So with the mesh and character it's all just part of developing it. I figure it's very important to get the feel and and look. Then later on come back to it and fix it up. Polish it off. 

There is always going to be two sides two how it should be done. Someone that is clear and I guess a little more talented could do it all in one sitting but I'm finding that the image in my head and my skill is a little different, So the best way to do it is to make base colours and build it up slowly.

Anyway enough ramble here's how the Evil Potato looks like. So this is the character that I did earlier in a concept art.

I've rigged my character and given him a base layer of colour.

As you can see I need to skin the weights on my model to make not collapse on its self.

Reference image in case you've forgotten what he looks like 

Modelling and Progression in Development of Game

Been just over a week since I've made a post. I had a huge productive week during Study Break.
Holy shit.. Study break and actually studied what is this nonsense :D

So to summarize what I did during my study break I first worked on alot of Halloween assets, to get ready for my development of my level. To make it look all scary and Halloween like, but more importantly to give me a feel of what I need to do and give it a bit of a story and direction

Halloween Assets

Then I worked on the random Generation of my Game. I wanted to make it like Diablo II one of my favorite games as a child. Random Generation has always interested me. I think it's something to do with the fact you can play a game and due to the generation it can feel different.

Random Generation in Unity

Layout

As you can see there is a huge difference between the two pictures above.

I've only got 6 tiles atm, and the outer edges are always mountain terrains to keep the player boxed in for the most part. Later on I will add an exit so that the player can progress.

I added a new camera script to my character place holder as well as converted all the settings the player makes on the generation screen so that comes into the game aswell.

I then also worked on my Evil Potato that you may have seen some concept art for a week or so ago. Making him in Maya. And then i'll rig him and skin the weights so that he's ready to animate. 

Obviously you can tell that with alot of my stuff it's un-textured. At some point i'll get on to it but atm I'm really trying to get a prototype level, So that I can get the general feel and flow to the game.