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Final Weapons & Mechs for SYNTHETIK -- [img heavy]

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So ive been working on Synthetik for about 3.5 years and after being finally released on steam a
couple months ago and totally neglecting my old thread, I think I post some of the assets ive
done here. I do game design and the art. We were 2 people, 3 now! 
For this game I also started with sound design  and programming. (Trailer at the end)

Here is how it looks - All is pre-rendered:












A bunch of the non-humanoid enemies which are ingame:


      


          






I won't go much into the environments because they are the greatest flaw in my opinion but I like how the props came out.
All is rendered with the Cinema 4D default/physical renderer. I tried octane renderer but the results did not hold up, mainly due to the ambient occlusion being nearly not visible, making everything lack definition from the perspective - but was much better suited for the weapon sprites actually. 

This is about the best screenshot I could take. The rooms are semi randomly generated



I did not manually texture anything, its all done with tiling materials, same for the weapons and enemies but the look is pretty clean and minimalistic.
At the start I almost went crazy with all the top down perspective issues, shadows could not be saved with proper alpha (until a newer C4D version came out with that as new feature...) and many things were just mind numbing that are done instantly in a 3D engine, like putting fences together.


Offline rendering cons:
Making fences or walls meld together with the shadows properly merging is just mind numbing work in 2D.
I rendered the shadows out with the props and putting things near each other often results in overlaps which look bad. 
- You are also extremely limited with animations and sprite amount. 
- You can not render in different resolutions only scale your final image or sprites
- The problematic environment building due to 2D made me create much inferior laid out spaces and proportions
- It has tons of cons not having 3D, but maybe a pre-rendered game in a 3D engine could remove most of those.

Offline rendering pros:
- No UV maps for any prop in the entire game 
- No baking, no texturing needed
- Infinite poly count for your models
- Very nice lighting and isolated GI but very static
- Anti aliasing and image quality at native is 2 levels above anything realtime,
scaling screenshots looks very good as result but yeah you cant change resolution ingame..
- Extremely superior performance on the GPU

Overall verdict: It has upsides that diminish every year in realtime progress but I wouldn't recommend it or do it again unless for smaller games



Time for the weapons - 



Focus in the game is on the gunplay and you can find around 70 different weapons.
There is heat management, jamming, discarding ammo, multiple ammo types,
a very deep attachment system, movement based recoil, we even have headshots in 2D space
which is giving a whole new dimension to the top down shooting gameplay. 

Also each weapon can be in one out of 20 variants with vastly different stats or new perks.



I tried to make the weapons as satisfying as possible and its really the key aspect of the game. 
It took a lot of iteration but at the current state im very confident that all weapons are very viable
and can carry your run in the right circumstances. I really hate when you play with pea shooters in
similar games or dead end weapons.

With 4 attachment slots and a lot of stat upgrades you can make any weapon competitive
or broken depending on the variant.

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Here some of the weapons, there are around 70 ingame:
Non-color graded raw images, colors and contrast look better ingame, all with tiling textures only, no UVs
































These are rendered with octane, I often took base models and modified them so I can not take credit
for much of the modelling, some were made by externals and then modified and textured.

Before and after:
 



Iteration was also super important for the weapon balance and the look and can really make a huge difference,
from first to second or third iteration:

 >

 >  



Here is how the weapon screen looks: 



Making a trailer was the most mentally consuming thing aside of the room generation trial and error we both had to get through,
its extremely hard to convey all the features in the game and I could write about unending things but yeah..

Ah, and when I started, the game looked god awful like this.... It really has gone a long way.
https://imgur.com/gallery/ckpVX

Trailer / steam page is here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/528230/SYNTHETIK/
Ill post some more stuff in the next days and weeks!






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