3D game portoflio environment, where to start?
polycounter lvl 9
Hi everyone.
I've been working at a small indie game studio for about 8 months now as a general artist and found that I enjoyed making game environments and I know what kind of environment I want to make, but I'm a bit indecisive as to how to go about doing it.
I want to make a low light, realistic, forested autumn environment with elements of exploration and progression. I also wish to have a little underground cavern to explore kind like 'dear esther' only much, much smaller. I love the idea of this environment that has a hidden and mysterious appeal so it's fun to uncover.
I love the idea of attaching a narrative to the environment in order to breath some life into it and make it more interesting to uncover.
My little piece of narrative is a little country alpine forgotten house where an old couple used to live and are now long dead. You play the role of a son returning to his parent's house to try to find how his grandfather disappeared. You find clues which point to your grandfather's body at the bottom of the well and that's the end of my narrative.
I know that might require scripting so if it is too much I would either drop the idea of having game states or ask my friend to help me out. But the least scripting the better
I thought of making it in unity 3d because that's the software we use at work and I'm sort of used to it at the moment. I know a few tricks like how to make running water and stuff like that work alright in unity. Although I've had really bad luck trying to get the vanilla lighting settings to look correct. Just getting the ambient light to look right is a huge hassle.
I thought of using UDK because I've used it for a couple of months in the past and things always seems to look nice in that software.
I am sort of familiar with matinee etc.
I thought about crytek just purely from the amount of speculation over the graphics and the quality that comes out of it.
Of course I've never really used this engine at all so...
I haven't really considered anything else just yet, but my goal is to be as employable as possible from some of the more established studios such as eidos. I guess I want just as much as the next (gazzilliounth?) guy to work at valve. I want to create something that has a beautiful crisp readability to it while still looking realistic.
Does anyone recommend a course of action for this goal?
I've been working at a small indie game studio for about 8 months now as a general artist and found that I enjoyed making game environments and I know what kind of environment I want to make, but I'm a bit indecisive as to how to go about doing it.
I want to make a low light, realistic, forested autumn environment with elements of exploration and progression. I also wish to have a little underground cavern to explore kind like 'dear esther' only much, much smaller. I love the idea of this environment that has a hidden and mysterious appeal so it's fun to uncover.
I love the idea of attaching a narrative to the environment in order to breath some life into it and make it more interesting to uncover.
My little piece of narrative is a little country alpine forgotten house where an old couple used to live and are now long dead. You play the role of a son returning to his parent's house to try to find how his grandfather disappeared. You find clues which point to your grandfather's body at the bottom of the well and that's the end of my narrative.
I know that might require scripting so if it is too much I would either drop the idea of having game states or ask my friend to help me out. But the least scripting the better
I thought of making it in unity 3d because that's the software we use at work and I'm sort of used to it at the moment. I know a few tricks like how to make running water and stuff like that work alright in unity. Although I've had really bad luck trying to get the vanilla lighting settings to look correct. Just getting the ambient light to look right is a huge hassle.
I thought of using UDK because I've used it for a couple of months in the past and things always seems to look nice in that software.
I am sort of familiar with matinee etc.
I thought about crytek just purely from the amount of speculation over the graphics and the quality that comes out of it.
Of course I've never really used this engine at all so...
I haven't really considered anything else just yet, but my goal is to be as employable as possible from some of the more established studios such as eidos. I guess I want just as much as the next (gazzilliounth?) guy to work at valve. I want to create something that has a beautiful crisp readability to it while still looking realistic.
Does anyone recommend a course of action for this goal?
Replies
But the engine doesn't really matter. What matters is getting it going, and getting it done.
Start with pencil and paper (or Photoshop) and concept out the flow, plus key locations. Make a quick whitebox level of the game, test the flow and playability. Start creating assets. Polish, review, refine.
Check out Robert Briscoe's postmortem, full of great info about his process.
http://www.littlelostpoly.co.uk/dear-esther/my-retrospectivepost-mortem-on-dear-esther/
I mean unity requires a butt load of extra shaders and scripts in order to look good you know? you probably already know that vanilla Unity is great for programmers but less awesome for artists.
This is the kind of lighting i would love to have in unity without shelling out a great deal of money:
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You very rarely need dynamic lights with accurate bounce- and transmission-coloring. This stuff can be (fairly easily) baked with the built-in light baker in Unity Pro. You can also make your own shaders without too much hassle, even if you're not a programmer, check out Strumpy's Shader Editor.