ESCAPE - Cosmic Horror - Andreas
polycounter lvl 14
First intention was to create a diorama with astronauts fending off monsters chasing them in a star-ship interior with old-school graphics, but it might turn into something more experimental, perhaps even a still-mockup for a game.
More to come soon.
More to come soon.
Replies
Up next though it's time to give the characters some attention.
Working on the astronaut. Started off more painterly but it got messy fast so I'm heading for the same clean pixel style as the architecture.
Got started with texturing the monster(s) as well. Going painterly on those which seems to work pretty well due to their organic nature.
Need to come up with some new rooms. Was thinking of making something sequential to present the astronauts attempt to escape.
Makes me wish I started down a similar path........ maybe it is not too late.
Awesome work so far I will keep an eye on this for sure.
Been working more on the astronaut but I figured I'd show the start on the fish-monster/alien. Getting pretty painterly on this one which might clash with the established style. Perhaps I can compensate by going with bolder strokes, or building it up with simpler gradations.
More pixelpushing on the astronaut. Don't know how noticeable it is but I'm trying to avoid drawing angles on the texture as much as possible to keep things from getting washed out through antialiasing. Instead I stretch out the uv's to my favor.
And by fish creatures means I changed my mind about replacing them. The insectoid alien thing I had come up with wasn't working, particularly in posing. The fish creatures are a lot more fun and their humanoid structure lends more to recognizable expressiveness.
Everything is quite messy as I work all over the place but I don't like working in a vacuum so It was time to show the progress so far. I feel I'm starting to figure out the style I was going for. Still thinking about different ways to involve lighting but I'm keeping it not shaded for the time being.
For the environment I've set to only use one 256x256 map and since there's not any noise and few patterns I can stretch uv's like crazy thus creating varying shapes and sizes of the same components. A bit costly on the polys though so might make bigger components on the map later as I got quite a lot of space left.
The current way I have my texture atlas laid out has resultet in some pretty un-optimized mesh construction. Next thing will be to improve that, a lot.
Just a quick update. Light maps didn't work out style-wise but after reading Simon Schriebt's blog post about volumetric glow in Doom 3 I got inspired to try with vertex coloring.
So far I'm liking how it's turning out. I also optimized things down quite a bit and rearranged the atlas map.
I'm thinking of going back to present the enviro in a cut-through style. At least I'm liking it more seen from a distance.
Getting the grips on ShaderLab, unity's own shader language. Getting closer to what I have in mind. The cast shadow on the characters are just projectors. The shadow map is too hires so need to come up with an alternative.
This is how I'll present the scene, as a cut-through diorama, which was my first intention when starting this project.
Now I just got to figure out the action taking place.
Now though I'm itching to make something more gritty and less pixelated!
@cupsster: Thanks for the heads up. Strangely enough it didn't occur to me to research what that kind of hardware is capable of, but if I'd ever make a prototype of this that would probably be the target platform.
You make this game!
RIGHT NOW!
Hope you go gold medal on this contest.
best of lucky =]