Super Battlelands
polycounter lvl 11
EDITS:
We have a website
http://superbattlelands.com/
Most Recent In-Game Screenshot:
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Hi all!
So I teamed up with a programmer and started creating art for our game, Super Battlelands.
It's heavily inspired by Advance Wars and I would really appreciate hearing what you think about the terrain models I have created so far.
Ocean tiles and waves are still WIP.
Please ignore the placeholder units :P
Random map generation:
Up close of some of the tiles:
^These buildings will change colours depending on which team captures them through the shader.
We have a website
http://superbattlelands.com/
Most Recent In-Game Screenshot:
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Hi all!
So I teamed up with a programmer and started creating art for our game, Super Battlelands.
It's heavily inspired by Advance Wars and I would really appreciate hearing what you think about the terrain models I have created so far.
Ocean tiles and waves are still WIP.
Please ignore the placeholder units :P
Random map generation:
Up close of some of the tiles:
^These buildings will change colours depending on which team captures them through the shader.
Replies
I would really like to hear some suggestions for the blue tank. We can't seem to agree on what would look best for it. I personally like how it looks right now, but my buddy's concern is that it has a lot of non-team-colour-based details on it (the treads on the sides).
Any suggestions are more than welcome.
But approaching it that way would keep all the different unit types of one team consistent and similar. Hope that helps!
Subbed.
P.S. I'd be super interested in helping out just to participate
-Kyle
We thought about going with different styles of units for each nation, but in the end we decided it would be better to have the shape and silhouette of each unit be the same across them all for ease of identification. We decided to use textures to differentiate and enforce a theme pertaining to each nation instead.
As for going higher detailed, we're both fans of low poly stuff so it was a conscious decision to go with lower res models and textures :P
Your suggestion for different tech across nations is interesting and perhaps we can find a way to incorporate that somehow.
As for mechanics, nothing is set in stone at the moment, however we do want it to be very chess-like, similar to what made Advance Wars so great.
Today I got his units ingame:
Keep at it!
I redid the blue tank since I thought danieru was right and there was a bit too much non-team-colour based details on it. I decided to go with a more lobstered/scalloped armour.
I think it fits in much better now.
It also makes it easier to transfer that kind of detail between units to achieve a more cohesive look to them all.
And I finished the fighter planes last night. :thumbup:
Please let me know what you think
This week I made some infantry for each country.
Each country has its own helmet and backpack
Danieru implemented colour changes to capture-able buildings and we would like to know if the colours are too dark on them at the moment. We're worried if we make them brighter, they may draw attention away from the units on the maps.
Any thoughts?
Thanks for the feedback!
I suppose you are right. The AO is not very obvious at all in its current state.
I increased the strength so it would become more noticeable when a building is captured. Only problem is now, uncaptured buildings have extremely dark shadows on them (due to how the shader applies the colours. We'll figure something out though.
I managed to do quite a lot this week.
I made some coat of arms / ensigns for each of the countries of the game:
Azure Isles
Lumos Alliance
Lavender Lands
Rose Republic
I also finished my favourite looking unit so far:
Battleships
Along with the heavy tanks:
Feedback is very welcome.
As far as feedback goes I've got a couple of suggestions. I hope you guys don't mind that I did a couple of quick, crude paintovers, but I thought it might be clearer than trying to describe it with words alone:
First, I agree with TeriyakiStyle about adding a more distinct light direction to the textures, but I also think it'd help to do this with the unit textures, too. I think it'd really help describe the forms of the units and help tell them apart.
Another big thing that stands out to me are your color tones and saturation levels. One thing I think Advance Wars did really well, which might go unnoticed by some, is that they did an amazing job of subtly separating the units from the background and making it easy to tell where your units are at a glance. I think this was achieved by (1) giving the units higher contrast than the backgrounds, and (2) pushing the colors of the environment assets in one direction to unify them. In the second image I took your screen shot as is (top), then modified it by making some adjustments to the background elements (bottom). Along with adjusting the color palette, I also added a couple things you might consider to help make your units pop:
Anyway, hope that was at all helpful. As I said, this is lookin cool. Looking forward to seeing more of your progress.
I miss some shadows under the tress too.
Keep it up!:)
I'm just the programmer so Uberren gets the final say but I'd like to implement your ideas. I was planning to implement some drop shadows but my plan so was to use a pretty complex method. I think I should be able to get away with a simpler drop shadow texture below units. Likewise I can add a dark outline as well.
I may also add back in the skybox earlier versions had, this time I'll use a gradient like your paintover.
@Sanislov: Good idea for the trees. Right now I have the code randomly placing a trees to form a forest. It should be possible to add a shadow in the model and get shadowing while keeping the procedural placement. I'll ask Uberren about it.
Thank you so much for the paint overs
For the lighting on the units, I am constrained by 128x128 texture resolutions, however I believe I can get something similar to the effect in the paint over you provided.
Got a lot of tweaking to do now
Also, I love the change you suggested to the environment textures. It really ties the room together.
I felt something was a bit off but seeing the solution laid out like that really helped.
And yeah, like danieru said, we were planning on implementing drop shadows and the like but hadn't gotten around to it yet.
I read the title as Super Battletoads, though, and I can't help but be a little disappointed.
Looking so good, huuuuge Advance Wars fan despite being terrible at it haha.
I think having rounded off edges on the corners of the map would be nice. We'll probably leave some of that polishing off until after all the units are finished. Also, if danieru is up to it :P
We have a website now if anyone is interested
http://superbattlelands.com/
Here's what I made this week for the unit line up:
I also went back through all of the old unit textures and updated them to have better lighting info.
Made a gif for a couple of them:
Along with that, I changed all the previous terrain textures we had and lightened them up and added a reddish tint to them, similar to Klamp's paintover
We also have the basic workings of an outline going for our units as well. As you can see, there are some rendering issues when units overlap with each other and some of the terrain. Hopefully nothing impossible to fix though.
Sorry for the silence.
I finished off the rest of the seaborne units and an attack helicopter
We also spent a lot of time figuring out what to do about the logo.
Well, here are the ships.
The cruiser. It's a seaborne, anti-aircraft and anti-submarine unit:
The submarine is an anti-ship unit. We decided we are going to add fuel to the game, so the for the submarine, it would consume more when it submerges, like in Advance Wars:
Aaaaand the attack helicopter:
Going to work on transport/resupply vehicles next. One for ground, air, and sea.
We have been chugging along but I just hadn't gotten around to posting to Polycount. Here's a quick run down of what's been added.
First, we updated the cliff tiles so as to not be so harsh and blocky. I also went back through the textures and painted in lighting detail and created custom forest tiles (previously, the tree placements were randomly generated):
Danieru also put together a shader for the shoreline animations, while I made some animated tiles for the ocean (sorry for the poor gif quality, a lot of the colour from the ocean got compressed out):
Along with the map updates, we began working on battle screen units (close up versions of the units that will appear on a new screen when units fight each other).
My original attempt at making the battle screen tanks was rather poor, and we decided to scrap them and start over.
Here's what my original attempt at the tanks looked like:
Very poor quality, it's a bit embarassing
Here's the updated version of those tanks, with higher polycounts:
And here are the battle screen fighter planes I completed last night:
So that's how it's looking so far.
We're in the process of making some new tiles to break up the grass everywhere along with explosions after units get destroyed.
All units also have idle animations on the map now.
Lots of AI improvements as well + the addition of basic sound effects. It's actually possible to play a decent match now (although there are still some bugs).
Any crits are always super welcome.
Well here is where the texture is at now, but we're not very happy with it so I will be redoing it:
Any suggestions for how to improve it would be appreciated.
I plan on adding some AO, first of all.
Here's a different layout I might try, for example:
I got rid of the ugly green fields and replaced the pumpkins with bales of hay.
The houses have also been changed to a grain elevator, which will be a semi-rare tile that will appear when there is a large cluster of farm tiles together.
I also made the elevator much smaller in comparison to capturable structures to, hopefully, not confuse people into thinking it's a capturable thing with a purpose.
I quite liked those houses so hopefully they'll find a use later on...
or perhaps a bit more realistic where the bales are a bit less organized.
I think a more gold coloured ground with lines where it was cut would be a bit better imo.
Thanks for the crits!
The references I was looking at had the bales of hay all facing the same direction as if they were all rolling down a hill. I do like the more disorganised look though.
I see your point with the texture under the bales being just the default grass texture, I'll make some adjustments
In game, there were too many dark dirt tiles being generated so I changed the dirt around the grain elevator to wheat to lighten up farm areas more.
Here's a screenshot of a map with some of those changes:
And here's a long ranged, anti-air unit I created: