Did a little more with level blockout. Wasn't happy leaving the end area quite so unfinished. Added a bit more detail to a few buildings in the Agora that are very blocky. Also increased height of the acropolis so it's more of an epic climb to get to the boss fight. It can now be seen from almost anywhere in the level which I think improves scenery in a lot of places.
I'm also adding a few short indoor sections. No combat, just transition areas. I feel it may help with pacing, and gives a more intimate relationship with the setting. These will depend on some good props to make them look like actual places people live.
Since I am ahead of schedule I might spend a couple more days finalizing the level a little more. I added some simple color to some of the columns and will do more of that across the level. I've brightened the generic marble texture that is used on virtually all the buildings right now to an unrealistic white, but I feel that it may look very nice once more accent colors are in. These accents will be mostly trims on temples and columns. Some smaller buildings may be painted. But I think the very bright white will contrast nice with blood and mud splatters.
If I do much stylization with the art, I think it would be done mainly with the color palette. Simplify it down a lot and avoid too much realistic detail that can make the screen noisy and difficult to read. We will see though, I have some general principles in mind but much of the art is feeling it out as I go.
Here is walkthrough of entire level with no gameplay, just art and music. Not sure what sort of critiques can be made for a level blockout, but if anybody has thoughts, I'd love to hear them. Always good to get some second opinions before pulling any triggers:
Was getting creative burnout from so much level blockout and trying to start with characters just wasn't happening. I did get together plenty of concepts and grabbed a few models that might be used for base meshes.
Shifted gears to some more techy stuff. Working on a tool to export objects by name from maya to a csv, and then in unreal this gets read and instanced static mesh components added for each.
Tooling:
The tool is all working except that in some cases rotations are wrong. It seems that there is a formula needed to convert (its more complex than just swap Y with Z). I have some notion of the problem but have to do further research to solve it. It looks like deep math which is not my forte, but so long as somebody has solved it before and wrote something about it, I should be able to eventually. But there is alternative workflows to accomplish the same thing using unreals in built tools, they just are slightly less ergonomic.
In general I think as a solo developer it is better to avoid doing such work unless there is clear evidence that creating a tool will unequivocally save major time. In this case it seems so.
Level Design Review and Overhaul:
After some time off and then review of the level design so far, I've made some plans for an overhaul of zones 1-3. There are just a couple zones that I feel like have that special spark. Others, while okay, just don't quite feel like a proper game yet.
First, although I haven't test game with others yet, I feel pretty confident people are going to need a lot more short engagements with easy enemies to have a more reasonable difficulty curve. I also feel that my ideas for setting aren't quite communicated well enough if we are in a marble city, so I add an additional zone outside the city gates which will be in iconic greek olive farms. Terraced hills, cyprus trees, dirt roads lined with cobblestone fences. I want to see a lot of mud roads, cobblestone, goats and irrigation ditches. Things that really make you think "quaint old world charm", more so than "classical greek democracy".
I've only began poking at this, but basic idea is that we begin on an overlook, then drop down and a terraced hill village on either side should frame our path to the city gates:
Within the city, I have elevated the further neighborhoods so that we get more vertical layering.
This also gives more opportunity for interesting architecture like stairs carved into rock:
It's a visual improvement for sure, but I think I can do better than that.
The zones in the city I am going to further subdivided so that each is comprised of three layers of verticality. Basically when viewed from a distance I want to be able to see each of the layers gently rising up. This will look better artistically is the main goal and also help both me and the player see distinct arenas, where each one offers a clear challenge. I think for a high difficulty game there needs to be a distinct feeling like you get from one checkpoint to the next, so that you can easily measure your progress. If you feel like you are just lost in this big level it might feel too overwhelming - at least for the first level in the game.
Environment Art:
I'm still some distance away from replacing blockart art with finished art but I've begun iterating a modular kit a little bit. I still do most of the blockout just by scaling a few simple shapes, however now I am occassionally converting some of them to modular pieces just to start getting a handle on that. Figure out what sizes work best, how I might design buildings to maximize reuse from just a handful of parts.
Okay, this post will talk about next big iteration for the level design.
The previous design was probably fine, however I have plenty of time before my first deadline and I think there are some major improvements that can be made both artistically and for gameplay.
Level blockout update
In previous post I mentioned that I am adding some olive farms outside the city gates to serve as introductory area. I've blocked out just enough to settle on a basic composition:
The little hill towns will only be in the background, not playable space. This way it doesn't add too much extra high fidelity assets that I need to make.
The game play area I specifically want to just be a pretty large, open space. Some slow zombie like enemies will just stumble towards player, offering plenty of chance to get used to the games shooting mechanics. The visual interest of the area will rely on the ground, foliage, and props, while these little terraced hilltop towns just frame the area. Since it won't have a real impact on how the player moves I wont bother detailing it further yet.
Side note: I cannot find a good game ready olive tree model. I am very familiar with speedtree and foliage creation, but it is a pain in the ass so I'd like to just buy one. If anybody has some olive tree models for games in your library please let me know! I'll buy it!
Level design planning change
Decided to redo all areas except for the Agora.
Previously I started with some story beats and some gameplay encounters and just kinda placed those landmarks and winged it from there. That was fine - just have to get some paint on canvas to get started.
But result was that I end up with something like a painting but the fundamentals are a bit off. Pacing and difficulty curve aren't right.
So this time I am planning it out by chunking level into time slots. Basically time is the constant thing and I'll use all the other variables to solve for a given time.
As with many things, a spreadsheet is helpful for this:
It is not possible to be super accurate with the time estimates. It is doubtful I'll even be able to get enough outside play testing done to generate useful data to know for sure what optimal pacing is. So I'll just have to use similar method as I used in previous games (which turned out to be pretty accurate). Basically if a section feels mildly challenging for me, that will feel extremely challenging for average, new gamers. So then my time estimates will be my average play time on the hardest difficulty, including do-overs.
This isn't so much about trying to optimize the game design, it's more about defining a measurable goal so that I can know when the level design is finished instead of just going on gut feelings.
Modular kit, trial run
Another thing I'll be working on in this iteration is to try and redo most of the buildings from a modular kit. This is basically a trial run for the enviro art creation. Since I haven't done very complicated modular kits before, I don't think it is realistic to do it well in one pass.
Finally, I'll be updating the layout of west side of the city so that we get more vertical layering, and a stronger contrast in style between the neighborhood streets and the main road. Neighborhood should be tight, windy, with many quaint little courtyards. Main road large, linear, more grandiose.
In the level blockout I've built from the Farms up to Streets Arena
3, which is about 30 minutes of gameplay, going from easy to moderate
difficulty. I am pleased with the pacing now, it feels like what I would
expect from the first level in a game. It is a pleasant level of
challenge and feels like you are being fed enemies at the optimal pace
so that it remains engaging but not overwhelming.
I've done so using a pseudo modular kit, which is nothing more than just rectangles of standardized sizes. But this was still enough to get a good idea on what the modular kit will need to be. Since it is so ugly looking though I'll show videos once I've refined it a little further to resemble more than big blocks.
But
before I completely commit to the level art, I really need to feel 100%
confident in the gameplay. I am still using one generic melee behavior
set for all melee enemies. In order to properly test out the next arenas,
I need to be using the actual enemies as I've imagined them. So it is
time to switch gears and get the athenian soldier, athenian hoplite, and
athenian archer models, animations, and code done.
As with the level geometry, first I just do the quickest viable version that I can, being careful to setup my project files so I can easily go back and iterate on them for polish later.
Updates - Begin work on basic soldier enemies
Got a quick version of the athenian soldier done. This tough guy just gets a sword. No shield. That's why he's going to die.
Most of the mesh I bought from sketchfab, though I'll be making some edits to make it more of my own eventually. The basic design won't change a lot, but I'll probably make his blue colors pop a bit more, make his musculature more wiry looking, and of course he should have a beard.
I've done a quick job rig and skin it so just ignore some ugly deformations for now. I also dusted off the animation cobwebs and did a combat idle. Tomorrow I'll finish the rest of his basic animations.
Project Organization and Team Management
As I go through the work this time I am working on building my checklist so that I don't lose speed when changing gears in the future. This is just where I log any of those pesky issues that are easy to forget a month later. if it takes you 10 minuets to re-remember something every time you change jobs as a solo developer, it will grow to make you dread changing jobs. Builds fatigue. So it has become essential to me to meticulously write down workflow.
LEVEL DESIGN - Change of strategy
Previously, in blocking out the level, I just started with a few landmark encounters that I had in mind, or a story beat, and then just filled in the blanks from those. But this led to poor pacing and an insecure feeling, like if you were hiking in the woods and not quite sure where you are at. That's no good way to work - need a little more surety. So I have tried now to blockout the level into time chunks. Starting from a desired length for the level, then I can figure out how long each beat ought to last. It's easier to think about this way for me, and easy to analyze the level as a players experience. It gives better focus to my play testing and helps me more readily say, "okay this section is finished, because it last the desired length of time and is appropriate difficulty."
Data Driven Design setup
I am
also working on further designing way to tabulate level and game design
data. I've moved to excel spreadsheet for that. Right now this only is
for my planning, but eventually I'll put a lot of game config into this
same file. That way I can do things like " for all level 3 combat
encounters, increase enemy count by 20%", or "calculate average
estimated play time per level 2 combat encounter".
Art Design
Did more experimentation with rendering styles.Tried to be more scientific and actually compare A/B videos / screenshots. I'll do a proper write up of such comparisons in future, but for now I am strongly leaning towards a realistic cel-shaded style as is displayed in the GIF up top. Reason for this is:
visual clarity
can easily make artistic changes to values with minimal knobs (like globally adjust shadows so they aren't too dark, make highlights pop a little more, etc). Of course this is all possible with post process and the gazillion lighting tools but much faster and easier if its just three knobs in one material.
reduces total number of textures required
looks more finished with less time investment
does synchronize well with broader design principle to keep the theme adventure focused and not too heavy or grim, but it also does not feel so cartoonish that it couldn't be taken seriously
Athenian soldier and hoplite have enough animations to be playable. Now headshots and shields matter. If you headshot guys with a helmet it knocks them on ass and does small amount of damage, but doesn't do bleed damage. But in the second they are down you have opportunity to shoot their body or get away.
Quite a bit of polish is going to have to go into the fall down animations but as long as mechanics are communicated that's good enough for now. Next I'll work on wounded state locomotion and standard hit reacts. After that, the athenian archer and then athenian farmer models/animations.
I'm thinking either add some I-frame to the dive or tweak the animation somehow to make it more viable way to squeeze through a crowd without getting hit. Just cause that would be cool. Like sliding into home base.
Too much distractions in house to be able to focus on grinding out the last couple characters and animations, so did some easier work setting up a proper stylized shading system. Previously I had used some post process materials which basically act globally, and then if you want target specific things it's a pain in the butt. And there is a ton of flexibility issues. Too much to type, but very often you hit issues where getting thing A to look correct breaks thing X.
So here is a shader approach, where each building, character, etc has a unique material instance that handles the cel shading. This doesn't break compatibility with standard light or rendering features and is much easier to art direct.
The satyr that has all white material is stand in for athenian archer. I have the behavior but not the model yet. He won't be leaping like that, just a regular dude running.
Gameplay getting good. Level progression feels much better now. Just got to finish up the farmer, athenian archer, and then I'll begin work on the harpy which will replace the satyr archer in this level.
One happy accident regarding a question that has been in back of my mind about how to handle death animations: I have an animation for hit react and headshot hit react. Occassionally it happens that this animation triggers at the same time as death, which triggers ragdoll. The result is that the animation begins and then finishs with ragdoll, which ends up looking quite natural. This should allow me to get good variation with just a few death animations (like one for each cardinal direction). I do prefer the look of actual death animations compared to pure ragdoll. It will allow me to put some character in them. Like a spine shot makes enemy go rigid and them fall like a tree, for instance.
Didn't feel like starting new character yet, instead took some more passes on the main character.
This is just sort of a concept made by frankensteining parts from other characters together:
I think the basic idea works, though I'll probably just do leather gladiator sandals as bronze greaves feel too heavy. I might not have her wear any metal at all for a more primitive feeling.
For the body the main things that I think are important is that we see some of the back muscles when she draws the bow, and of course the arms and shoulders, and the thighs of course everybody liked to feel the Mediterranean breeze on their taint in these times. It must have been lovely.
The biggest focus is on her face. I feel that with some iterations I can achieve something satisfactory with the outfit and body. But the face is a big trouble for me. I am just not that great at doing faces. For now, this is just some daz model which is passable but its far from what I'd like. I'd absolutely just buy a model if one existed that fit my needs but nothing I've seen fits this character.
I generated one concept from midjourney that hits pretty close to what I have in mind:
This is pretty good because she is quite thin like you'd imagine a bronze age nomadic person would be, but she has the strong hero traits. Square face, sharp jaw, cold piercing eyes. I've been trying to sculpt this face - perhaps I have the shape correct but in unreal with the cel shader it looks pretty flat. Perhaps I need to do a little texture work to to bring in all together.
Well, I think it will be a much better game if the main character looks good so I'll keep working at it even if it takes longer than I'd like.
Okay reached a result with the hero that I'm happy with. I was feeling very low confidence about this but it only took half a day to get something I'm happy with. Face isn't exactly like the reference but I think it achieves the character that I wanted. She is attractive but not dainty / weak looking. Looks good with various expressions.
I had to crack open zbrush and spend some hours feathering the face, then send back to daz, then to maya, and finally to unreal - a pain in the butt workflow but the end result is that I want to keep the same topology as the daz gen8 so that I can load it back as a morph in daz. This way I can keep the joint-based face rig. I am not a good enough character artist to be able to judge how a matcap sculpt is going to end up looking in engine, I just have to see it.
The cel shader makes it so that you need to exaggerate features pretty heavily for them to read at all too. This was messing me up for awhile such that I ended up with some very strange alien faces, like plastic surgery gone wrong. Just a few tiny touches in zbrush can make a big difference that I can't read until the model is back in unreal under full lighting and shading setup.
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I considered the outfit more as well. This one is okay but it feels too... busy or something. Like imagine actually running a few miles dressed like this. Those leather slapping against your legs. You'd be so raw. What a nightmare.
I know pretty much no gamers would ever think that but I do and it's my character. So I wanted tried out some ideas from other concepts...
Something a little simple - just a tunic that might be frayed at the ends, and a leather guard for the midbody. I guess it's a corset? I think this makes nicer shapes overall and feels more iconic. Like with blurry vision you just have a few stark triangles.
So that is settled then. I won't take the model further than this now, but I'm going to rehash the animations because the way I did them before did not leave myself setup for iteration very well. And I didn't have the face rig figured out, but now I do.
Plus I am going to alter the locomotion mechanics a bit.
Tested out maya live link with unreal and it's pretty good to be able to preview animations in real time. But feedback is a bit choppy so its really only good for blocking in. Little details don't read at all. Not sure if it really speeds things up or not, but definitely nice to get some immediate feedback.
Character overhaul wasn't only about improving the model but also better setting up the rig and animation files so that I can more readily iterate over them as I continue to modify the locomotion mechanics. Since I was figuring out a lot of things with animations for the first time, I had not left animation files that could easily be modified. So now I just only do the basic core loop of the animation - no unique variations. Can add that in later if the animation survives till the end.
Also improved the rig. Now it is fully setup for everything I have planned. Have a joint based face rig. For gameplay animations, my idea is that I won't author face animations with body animations. I'll do them as additives in unreal and can fire them from events. Either notifies from other animations, or certain game events / conditions. Keeping them separate should give me more flexibility and simplify authoring.
Got a few animations re-did. The sprint fwd is more or less copied from paragon sparrow, but the rest I just make up as I go. I just know length of time they need to be for gameplay and besides that I just try to make them big and exciting. The bow charge especially is important to have timing just right - it feels great if there is a tiny little anticipation and then an aggressive fix, since the "gunplay" is really all about timing, kind of like a souls game.
*one note about timing, I have an idea, maybe it wont pan out but I try to time the looping combat animations to be in rhythm with the combat music tracks. So right now they are all 128 bpm, which means about 0.5 second intervals for major movements to be in rhythm. Probably won't read but worth a try.
All of the animations are like blockout +, meaning I just try to get the basic movement and timing good to help verify gameplay, but not bothering with polish yet.
With the locomotion loops what I learned is that they need to be cyclical - as in you can't have like a sneak walk animation with irregular forward speed (unless you were doing root motion). I mean you can get away with a little bit, but too much and it starts to look weird, since the game character moves at constant rate.
Another day or two and I'll have new controller ready and can swap in the new character.
note that some frames are lost in a GIF so animations look more choppy than normal framerate
Curious about her skirt: is that dynamically driven, or did you add bones on top of the daz rig?
the skirt is cloth dynamics in unreal, which gets added in the skeletal mesh asset . It collides with the physics asset. Getting it so that it looks natural and doesn't clip through seems impossible, lol. It looks like in examples like paragon they tend to only simulate free hanging things or just short frills, not so much a large piece of fabric that interacts with body. So I might be asking it to do too much.
The ponytails are animDynamics -> chain, and then there is some spring controller on body too for jiggly bits:
There might be some benefit to do skirt with an animDynamics chain - like I think I could better control for clipping with the body. But you wont get the cloth ripples with wind and it wouldn't really behave like cloth... however perhaps both methods could be combined. The chain for big movements and then cloth sim with much smaller range allowed just to get the little ripples. Something could experiment with later.
It is possible to get a better simulation in maya, but I don't think having them tied to animation clips would work as we can dynamically change animations at any moment. So maybe for cinematics it might do to go with better sim in maya and bake with the animations, but for interactive gameplay it seems like pretty much only option is simulate at runtime.
Frustrating previous two days. Its not an art update, however could help somebody avoid similar issues and maybe for somebody looking for a job at game studio it might give some notion what sort of stupid issues you might see from time to time.
So first big issue was that I was trying to solve a little issue where my root motion animation overrides gravity. There is some workarounds but I saw how you can just edit like one line in c++ so I tried that. What I didn't know is that you can't edit the source directly (in a launcher build it is read-only. Just there to help you learn). I disabled read-only and just tried to recompile...
So the project got broken and i couldn't open it. I did a fresh reinstall of unreal (this takes ages and having to wait drives me insane). But still with a fresh reinstall of the engine the project wouldn't open. Errors about needing to recompile from source. So I go in an view the errors and for some reason Rider is not finding the engine source directories which means certain includes can get found. If you give them absolute path name it works, but not for everything... anyway, I pull from version control and it's same story. So it is difficult to say where the problem is. Is it the engine, the project, the code? What? Long ass story short, the problem was with Rider. I recompiled the same source code in Visual Studio and voila, everything worked.
That was like a 16 hour day of debugging. Ugh. Usually I don't get too worked up over having to do some troubleshooting but this was especially stressful because even my version control backup wouldn't compile. Thought for awhile I was going to have to manually move things over which is barely viable as all references in assets aren't maintained so you have to go through a billion blueprints to fix things.
Next day I am excited to work on animations. I had done a few test with the rig file but didn't end up using the changes. Of course I do this all in separate duplicated files so it's non-destructive. But somehow in my haste, I must have done something weird. In unreal, my animations sometimes have slight offsets compared to the maya animation. The bow and arrow are like a few inches outside the hand.
A lot of troubleshooting. Rebuilding portions of the rig. Half a day wasted. Finally I find the issue - there was double constraints on the bow joints. Dunno how that happened - it's not how I built it. But apparently having double constraints can cause this issue where joints are offset a bit in the exported animation.
It is easy to forget, but when troubleshooting it's good to try and remember, don't just look where you think the problem is. Look everywhere.
Anyway, so there is something a little more 3d related, let me share my bow rig. I am very proud of this because I invented it entirely from my own mind, and the best thing is that it is simple. I think a bow rig could not be more simple. Naturally, as I'm not a pro rigger, the first thing I did was go and try to find some tutorials or existing examples. But my god, they were all complicated. I felt this could be done simpler. So here is what I came up with:
Two bones - a root and a string. Two controllers - one to handle the bow and one to pull it.
Each joint is parent constrained to the associated controller. And the string puller control is parent constrained to the bow handle control. It is important to do that constraint on a parent group so that you can zero the transforms (just watch some rigging 101 tutorials if you want to learn why).
That's it! It works just the same as any other bow rig no matter how complicated they are. I mean it is just a stick that bends after all.
With the character you can just constrain the bow handle offset to the wrist joint. But for unreal the bow joints do need to be parented with the main skeleton, so you can just add them to the root as a child.
For animations where the string puller hand should stay fixed to the string, I just add a constraint from the string puller control to the IK hand controller. Since the bows main control drives the string puller, then means you can easily adjust both arms from just one control (moving and rotating the bow to where it needs to be, and the hands follow.)
Animbot has some handy helper tools to make this much simpler, including Grab Release constraints. You can accomplish same thing using basic constraints in maya but its much less ergonomic and you'll face more hijinks. So definitely check out the trial of animbot if you're doing this sort of work.
The string only has a single edge ring in the middle. This goes 100% to the string joint. The ends of the string go just enough weight to the root so that they stay lined up with the arms of the bow when flexed.
After much playtesting I've developed an optimized way of playing the game. Now in this overhaul of character controller I am trying to make it so that it is as intuitive to play that way as possible.
Previously I had an extra button for combat stance, which ducks and crawl / ducked run. And then another button for dive. But I found dive wasnt very needed because you can out manuever enemy aim just with strafing. I like the feel of strafing and weaving but it shouldnt be OP. The dive feels badass and it should have a strong reason to use it.
I want the game to be as absolutely fast as possible, and i think to make that viable there needs to be as simple controls as possible. So i try to make it so that you can do a lot of movement just with joystick only. The cadence that you start and stop, how hard you cut turns, etc should all make for ways to out manuever the enemy.
So I am trying to give some limitations to movement so that you can still out manuever enemies aim but it takes a little more skill to do so. More than just wiggle the joystick back and forth. As you can see in the video, there is a hard stop after sprinting which immobilizes you for like 1/4 second. If you do it at the right time its a great way to break enemy aim, but it can also get you shot if you do it at the wrong time. There is also a little transition from idle to run. These animations are very rough but I need something basic to work with to get a feel for it and block in the code.
There is also some lean animations which actually help to turn you around a little more sharply. Eventually I'll polish these so that you get some satisfying footwork in there, such that when you cut back and forth to avoid enemy aim, she should look like football (american) player doing juke manuever.
Doing these interstitial animations is quite challenging. Getting things to time just right. Even getting an ugly blockout version just to work is not so easy!
a lot of work done on the character controller but probably still a few more days to complete its overhaul.
notably, I changed the dive from root motion to act more like traditional jump. it consist of three separate animations, a begin, a looping middle, and an end. This way the distance of the jump can be configurable through code. I was not sure if this setup would work or not so I just did bare minimum animation which is why it looks hilariously bad at the moment.
I've also added some lean animations when turning, though these are also just done cheaply - i just rotate the root bone in unreal. But once these get an actual animation will look nicer. Even so they make a big difference in how nimble the controller feels.
I wont bother with foot IK, instead I just have an animation that intakes ground angle and interps between an uphill, flat ground, and downhill locomotion. So far I only did the uphill version.
A lot of work with camera and camera shakes. Some near miss reactions just using a few frames harvested from existing animations but these I'll make their own animations soon and it will look better.
I suck at math so I spend too much time on some things but I think they end up being worthwhile - when sprinting and you stop suddenly there is a short foot plant transition - i add some camera shake that always goes in same direction as player velocity. I struggle with any math related code but usually after fighting with math for awhile I realize a much easier way to do it that requires no math at all. So now I just try to think "how would a caveman do this?" from the onset because there is almost always a way and simpler is always better in the long run. Much less brittle overall if everything is working with ABC's instead of trying to build a NASA rocketship.
With animation work I've begun doing more FK and less IK. It feels wonkier at first but it seems easier to get good arcs and keep range of motion within realistic limits.
Also, as you can see I've been messing around with post process, shaders, lighting. I'm not so interested in making any big decision, but since I record plenty of video then I can view it all later with many different artistic styles and see which ones I like the most.
Currently I've used a painterly post process effect on everything except characters, which helps them stand out a little bit. I also use a toon shader on everything which lets me easily art direct color and values globally. I found out that you can create material instances of material instances and this can be used to do things like change value of environment materials, or all character materials, while still being able to tweak individuals.
Past few days been animating like crazy but it's not stuff I will show because spoilers, just a snippet.
I have been working on cut scenes that happen before and after boss
battle. The only reason I do this now is because the student doing music
(for his final project) needs to have something to show along with the
tracks he scored for it and he is on a deadline. Some simple sketches would have sufficed but I
figured I'd probably be faster in 3d anyway.Kind of wish I'd just done sketches because doing two complete cutscenes (just blocking them in) in 3 days was exhausting.
Just some snippets to show the very first steps. It's all stepped animation, almost no inbetween poses, the only important thing right now was timing the scene with music. But for me personally it still helps to begin getting an idea what will work or not in cutscenes, and what sort of effort it will be to fully realize them.
Alright, hold the applause and put your wallet away. This masterpiece isn't for sale quite yet.
It is enjoyable to play as movie director. My big idea is to use a widescreen ratio like westerns and go between big wide panoramas to frame the scene and then up close to focus on character emotions. I do a few dynamic moving shots but sparingly. Here is one example, it feels weird without the music but the shot seemed to jive with the sound:
Lesson learned:
The music was scored to fit a screenplay I wrote, but since I have never done any cinematic my time estimates for shots and especially dialog were pretty far off. So I had to strip out a lot and making those decisions at same time as key framing is pretty taxing. But the good thing is now I have a clear picture what it's going to be like to make the cut-scenes and refined my maya workflow for that a bit.
It would be better to block in the cinematic first and then make music to fit it. In future I think that will be safest thing to do, but in this case it wasn't really feasible. Live and learn.
Next:
A little more work to finalize the music stuff for the students deadline, then get into adding the harpy character type.
Awhile back I saw some post on unreal forums that a student needs a game project to write music for as their final project for music school or something. I figured it would probably be some junky student music, but what the heck I won't lose anything from it and gives kid chance to work on something.
Turned out to be great music and covers like 80% of music needs for the level. More than enough for vertical slice and promotional needs. This theme song includes bits recorded by the European Philharmonic Orchestra.
I think getting some music going on early in project is pretty good. It provides a lot of motivation and direction, and other than unique scores for cinematics, it's not something that is so closely tied to anything that there is major danger or wasted time or do-overs. Like if a song doesn't quite fit where intended, it probably will somewhere else. And it seems relatively fast to produce music as well compared to 3d art stuff. Apparently the theme song for Halo was composed in like 3 days and how much of that games impact is owed to the soundtrack? Probably a lot.
First steps of the harpy taken care of. A basic model with focus mostly just on silhouette, and a rig. Animations over the next few days, and I probably wont bother with textures and refining the model until after the level art is completed. It seems much easier to make decisions about the design of characters after having played against them a lot.
I started by getting the code in place first, which turned out to be easy.
The clothing I'll probably tatter up a lot , but I think it has to be a bright color so that we can easily see the arms to know when she is drawing her bow. As for the bow, I think it will need to be oversized so that we can easily see its silhouette in the sky to also know when she is aiming at us. It seems pretty much mandatory that the wings be raven like this, otherwise she'd seem like an angel. Another option is bat style wings, but I want her to feel more fantastical and not so demonic.
The rig is a pain in the ass, but thankfully most of the hard work is already done thanks to advanced skeleton. I only needed to add some simple FK controls for the wings and talons. Of course you can make something very sophisticated and more animator friendly, but I dont think it makes sense to spend 50 hours on a rig to make 20 hours of animations.
As you can see, there is some lumps left from where I grafted the talons onto the daz base model. It probably seems sloppy to leave that sort of thing, but the thing is there is good chance I make some updates to this after playing for awhile. I might elongate the legs, might make her thicker overall, or more creature like... so for now just like everything else in game, I try to be careful about going too far too soon because there is never enough time or energy for all the task, so it has to be rationed carefully.
The main things are that the rig and skeleton are set, so changing model and transfer skin weights is fast and easy. Since so much of the character is in the animations, I prefer to evaluate the model in actual gameplay, rather than static like this. Like you might get a really nice silhouette and great shapes in some portfolio pose, but then in gameplay the typical animations just don't do that any favors. So it seems best to just get it in engine and evaluate it under gameplay conditions only.
edit: here is the code in action
and right off the bat the thing I realize is that they really won't need to be high detailed. 90% of time they are just a distant silhouette. All the character will be in the animation. Good thing I test gameplay first cause it would be easy to get into details and be texturing tiny little things for days otherwise.
Last time I fought harpies in a game I think was dragons dogma, whenever that came out, like 2010 or something. I was very excited about them - dunno why just seemed like a super cool enemy to fight. Unfortunately they were just a fodder enemy in that game and not very interesting. Not sure I ever played against a harpy I really liked. I wanted them to be like that scene in the old claymation movies, Jason and the Argonauts IIRC. Very dangerous menaces. I want them to feel menace-like. Not enough enemies in games feel menace-like. Perhaps the cliff racers in morrowind. They were menaces.
Anyway, pretty happy I think I've got the harpies that I've been wanting to fight all these years. They border on being too frustrating but I'll keep tuning things till they hit the sweet spot.
The animations feel a bit robotic. Harpies don't appear to actually be flying but rather like on an invisible roller coaster. Some inbetween animations might help... maybe. But when you are playing it's so fast I don't think it matters. You are just trying to not get shot. So I'll just work on improving the animations over a few passes and let it be.
Okay, that wraps up the little detour. I had been focused on completing level blockout, but needed to have all enemy types in order to know how best to lay things out. Now I've got them all (plus a further detour to upgrade the hero character), so back to the level blockout and then onto level art.
Okay, no new art, but some thoughts about marketing that might be something to think about even for other artist if they are thinking about how to market themselves with portfolio.
So I will start making some youtube devlogs because the common advice is to get started with marketing as soon as possible. Since the game mechanics are mostly finished I figure that is good enough time. There is a game that can be played, even if it is still largely blockout art.
I am not sure I agree with the prevailing wisdom. Even among seasoned developers and artist who understand what early stage art looks like and how it transforms over time, I don't think showing them early stage stuff really effects them in any way that is going to convert their interest into eventually buying the game. I mean I like to show all stages of my work here because I figure it may help some beginners get a realistic picture of all the ugly shit you have to work through before finally getting to something finished. Maybe some value there but if trying to get somebody interested to buy a game... I don't think there is any benefit.
Some people say that you absolutely should not show any early stuff, only dress to impress so to speak. But so what if I show something which doesn't look great? It is not like potential customers remembers some random devlog they saw once that looked bad, and thus they won't buy game if it looks good later? What is risked?
It seems like there could be a small opportunity to gain some eyes and accumulate something over time if starting early, even if game is still rough. Other benefits is I gain much needed practice to make better video content. So there is two plusses.
Downsides is I already work 10+ hours and seldom takes days off, so energy for video content is scant and I'd rather just focus on game. So interest to make higher tier marketing content just is not there, and I am not convinced that people who follow youtube devlogs are even the same ones who buy the game in the end. Seems most "successful" devlogs are focused on the person and not the game, and do not correlate to more than moderate success of the game.
Anyway, just some thoughts! Would love to know if anybody has some opinions on the topic.
Getting close to six month review. I make a full review after completing my next milestone but a few short notes might be worth sharing here.
In previous six months I have:
completed prototype, which tested out a few combat mechanics and discarded many ideas to focus on a focused ranged-only design
completed preproduction, which figured out workflows for character rigging and animation, modular level art, programming architecture covering everything from gameplay scripts to UI to SFX integration, and cinematics
refined meta game design so that no major game design questions remain
iterated blockout of first level a few times, but not 100% finalized yet
hero character and 90% enemy models and animations are close to MVP
Next six months will be production of the vertical slice. I feel that it should go faster than that but we will see.
But first...
Before getting into production, I've decided to get a playable demo ready first. I am trying to get this finished in three weeks time. In first week I got code ready so that we start from a menu with basic accessibility settings, and then can go through the whole game loop.
The demo will be a wave horde battle arena that takes place just in one closed off section of the first level.
The intent for this demo is:
Start getting outsider impressions of the core game mechanics
Have a build that can be sent to publishers
I am not sure that I am interested in working with publisher or if I ever even get any reply. But I think it can be a good exercise to get a pitchdeck ready and go through full build process and start iterating on how I market the game. Best case scenario is some publisher is willing to help me with marketing and fund just enough so that I can hire some contractors here and there when needed, but they also stay out of my hair and don't try to impose anything that makes fun work not fun anymore.
Mostly likely scenario is I do a lot of work to be ghosted, but I think it doesn't result in wasted time because I need to focus on marketing material and presentation at some point anyway.
Art updates:
Modular Kit construction
Working on kit to be used for temples first. Because many of the buildings will be partially destroyed, it means that the interior construction will be exposed. So I need a kit that is composed of water-tight, individual construction pieces so that I can basically build and deconstruct temples and the innards at least seem believable.
I was having a lot of trouble finding good sizes that work for a lot of different temples shapes. What I learned is that rather than trying to come up with the small units first, define the largest units and then just divide them. Here is what I mean:
For max reuse and easy construction, I want for temples to always be in sizes like 10m, 12m, 20m, etc. Even though real life temples are usually like 73m or whatever.
I make a cube in maya and then use the Bounding Box Scale tool to set exact measurements. This is a handy tool and also works as a way to easily measure size of a mesh.
I have started by creating the absolute biggest wall any temple will have, and then I use insert edge loop tool to break it into individual bricks. The bricks end up being half meter increments like 1.5m, 3m. I am not good at thinking in math so I would have thought bricks need to be whole sizes and this is why I was getting hung up with walls that would not interlock together correctly.
The temple does not need to be historically accurate, but because it does need to be believably constructed it has helped a lot to do some research on how they were actually made. Thankfully somebody else has already done the research and compiled into helpful videos using 3d models already:
So this gives good checklist of parts needed and also a good vocabulary. So I get one temple created from this kit and then make sure I can make some variations easily, then I'll know that it is good to go.
Making enviro art seems to be the biggest time cost in project. Everything else I have pretty good picture how long each task takes. I think with enviro art I am going to have to look for many ways to simplify it so that it can be done faster. For a solo project I don't think it is sustainable to work only on one area of project for months at a time before reaching a milestone. For instance with characters I can make a new character and have it animated in project within 3-5 days. That is good because there is a big victory and clear progress at end of week. For level art it isn't going to do if it takes me same amount of time to make a single building though. So figuring out how I can simplify and get max reuse is major thing I'm focused on now.
Before sending in enviro art I've cleaned up the materials.
Using material instances it is possible to basically use inheritance but for materials. So I have a few hierarchies so that I can easily tweak value, color, and other parameters for various groups. For instance, I have all enemies sharing a common material, all enviro art another, pickups another, and so on. This way I can do things like make all enviro art slightly less saturated, pickups a little brighter, characters use an outline, etc, and only have to change a couple material instances, instead of dozens.
Okay, finally making some headway with modular environment kit. Much indecision because this is my area of least experience, hence posting about it alot, lol.
Workflow will be to only use maya to make the parts, but assemble them as Packed level instance in unreal. This means I got to do the snapping in unreal which I hate, however all things considered it's going to be the most time effective option.
But because I can set things up much faster in maya, I am fully testing out the kit first by constructing a good amount of buildings then I just quickly test in unreal. Once it is all verified then I'll finalize the kit and reassemble them in unreal.
Making a few sized temples and trying to find which elements can be shared throughout. Then I'll make sure I can make a few unique variations and add in unique parts as needed.
Some rocks and foliage, plus some lighting adjustments.
I've just placed rocks along borders, and also reused the rocks with just a world aligned grass material to help make the paths look more detailed. I might just do it like this instead of using a landscape.
I'd like to make my own rocks but I'd never finish. Doing the buildings is time consuming enough.
Below: This is the raw lighting without exposure correction. I go back and forth if I like it very bright like this or not. The story requires it to be an unusually hot day so I kind of want to exaggerate that. At same time I dont want to burn eyeballs out or make gameplay less legible. I'll probably tweak lighting until the very end and never be happy.
Okay got first building in the game. I have some more detail trims to put on it but for now I am going to skip past those final touches and try to get the main chunks of each major building ready. I have a feeling workflow will get a lot more streamlined so I'll save those more time consuming parts for once I get the production machine better oiled.
That is with a more realistic rendering style. I like how crisp everything looks, however I fear that without an obvious stylization to the art, people are more likely to be hyper critical and get nit picky about realism. The little bit of feedback seemed like that is the case. That might just be bias of the sort of people who write critiques on internet and not representative of gamers at large, however I do think that to some extent realistic style graphics must set a different sort of expectations.
Below is an alternative approach using a painterly effect which is masked just to the environment, not characters. I'd still say the overall style is realism but it does change how things feel. I also do a slight desaturation of the enviroment as well to help characters pop out a little better. Because of this painterly effect basically mushifying small details, it does make it so I can reduce most textures to be really small, like 256 or less. That seems like a major benefit! A lot of people who want to play indie games dont necessarily have great computers and I won't be able to squeeze out the sort of performance a real studio could, so keeping my assets to be a lot lower resolution in general is probably best way to improve performance.
I've done a ton of work on materials. Getting everything consolidated down to just a couple master materials. So far I am only using world aligned materials so I don't have to do any UV's. I'll just take this as far as I can since it is fast and easy. I found a quick way to make things look a little more complete and "tied together" is to add a couple overlay textures on top. These are also world space projected. Especially with things like rocks which might each have slightly different hues, this makes them all seem like they are growing together. You know how rocks grow.
There are plenty of other ways variety and interest could be added - like vertex painting to blend multiple materials- but for now I am trying to get as far as I can as fast as possible, so I'll avoid doing more manual labor like that until everything is in place.
The hard edges between blue paint of the columns I'll have to do something about. It's just face assigned materials but I'll need some way to make the edge look more natural. There should be some sort of paintings on the pediment and other trims around borders, but again I'll save this time consuming detail work for the very end.
I also need a couple of fractured versions of things like the columns and marble blocks, but once I have all the buildings done it will be better time to figure out which unique pieces are needed.
Also did some stone stairs. Without the overlay textures the differences between the various rocks looks unnatural.
A couple new buildings and also made a few materials for colored walls. got a little more than half of the buildings done. this is just the main architecture of them so they still feel pretty barren when you go inside. props and unique stuff i'll have to do in another pass.
This is very tedious work so once i finish the architecture then i probably go to characters for a bit before finishing out the enviro art. it is fun but very tedious. i wouldnt want to be an environment artist professionally, no way.
Had to take a break from the enviro stuff my hands were hurting from it, so I knocked out a bunch of short coding task and also made a few additional outfits for hero, in addition to improving the textures.
Will be working on second pass at enemy character models and then animations in coming weeks before finishing out environment.
Also had a chat with an experienced producer which helped me review my schedule and adjust priorities going forward from here. Things seem to be on a good track. I can just put nose to the grindstone with confidence where it is all headed towards.
I moved most of the major classes in the game to c++ so that it is easier to refactor into the future. I still prefer blueprints for speed but if you want to do something like move a bunch of delegates to a separate class it is a big problem to do that in blueprint.
It took a week and was a major pain in the butt but hopefully having the base class header files in c++ will save me effort in the long run.
Been focused on scheduling more than anything in last week. Now that I know how each part of project will be done and can make reasonable time estimates I am trying to get a full schedule drawn out. The main motivation for this is just for teams (me) sanity. Need to be able to step back and see the big picture and know where we stand. If not certain that I am walking in correct direction it is not a good headspace to be working in.
One big indecision I've been struggling with is whether or not to spend ~ an extra month to make a pitchdeck and vertical slice demo to deliver to publishers. The reasons against is because it shifts my focus a lot from just building the game and also requires me to do a lot of work which would only serve this purpose and not have a ton of re-useability. And it seems like chances are high it all ends up in just being ghosted or maybe some bites but no fish caught.
Looking at examples of historical pitches we can see that even teams composed of industry veterans with many well known AAA titles in resume struggle to get funding and have to jump through a lot of hoops. Also have seen examples of games projected by publishers to do well that under perform. So I am not sure how much trust can be put into this sort of thing unless they are pumping serious money into marketing and I don't think that sort of publisher would even look at such a project.
As part of scheduling I am reviewing much of the game design. Things like how you will unlock new items, what incentives there are to replay a level, stuff like that. I had some initial ideas but this sort of thing seems like it is better to design so that it works best with the scope of content that you can make and also the game play style.
Well, as for art, still about at same location - need to polish the main character animations quite a bit and then will move into making new content (enemies and more level art). But probably another week fixing up code and finalizing production plan.
gonna go through with pitch deck and vertical slice demo. I just design the pitchdeck so what art I make for it can be reused.
Begun a 2d artwork that will be kind of like a movie poster with a bunch of characters and enemies on it. Today I settled on the composition and color and started blocking in. its a big painting so I'll probably get it to like 80% and then just poke at refining the details here and there when tired of more technical work.
using art rage oil paint brushes because i find it to be intuitive with work with. since i am not an experienced digital painter i just want something that is easy to get into and gives a decent looking result. also it seems to help me avoid over detailing.
end up day updated - should have stopped five hours ago but was having fun. still a little bit more to do, I especially want the lettering to read cleaner
edit: anybody has any critiques for these illustrations I'd love to hear them.
"Finished" this illustration. There are a few bits of detailing I'll poke at here and there, like making some of the horses faces more distinct. Also moved the text to a separate layer so its more modular. I might settle on a different text logo in future so its better to keep it separated.
For the text I want something thicker but with hard angles and slight askance like that. Haven't found an existing font yet so I might have to just paint it. Many of the greek themed fonts feel soft or cartoony, or have bad legibility.
Got a second illustration to about 80% and will poke at the finishing bits here and there in future.
Process in artrage:
I can barely draw a human figure to save my life. So what I do is grab renders of my 3d models in different poses, then arrange them affinity photo to find composition I want. A few of the monsters I dont have a 3d model for so I just find a couple concepts online and frankenstein my own thing together from them. Thats usually how I design my 3d characters anyway.
I export that collage and then in artrage you can make it a reference layer, and then you can set colors to auto-sample from the reference. THen its not too hard to just paint over. From there its typical painting techique. Block in the main color pretty roughly, then go in and add the colors to start giving form. I just kind of bounce around the painting from one spot to another when I get bored.
Once the base painting is pretty refined then can duplicate the layer and do an overlay or multiply and mask little spots to make them pop out a little more. These seems to be a pretty efficient workflow to get a decent result for somebody who can 3d but not so great at 2d.
One thing want to make a note of, if you are a generalist like me and constantly learning different disciplines, one problem is that you are always improving. Because you go from beginner to intermediate and those can be a big jump in quality, compared to smaller improvements you make once you are really good at something.
This can often lead to a desire to redo things completely, once you gained a bit more skill. Of course this can be necessary to do if you have to hit a certain quality but if you are on a deadline it can cause problems. Just something to be aware of for solo developers. Or anybody, I guess, though presumably somebody working as a specialist at a studio probably is beyond beginner in their trade.
Looks great and are parts of it traced or basically everything done freehand?
Can also see some inspiration from the golden age of 'sand n' sandal' 50s 60s poster art, too.
The greek style text imo fits in to the setting or genre of your game, maybe increase the lettering gold border slightly so "OF" is more readable.
Overall well balanced not to busy composition, drawn using a simple hot - cold (warm - cool colour) palette plus most importantly what you've illustrated is what the player encounters in your game.
Hi! Cool illustrations, I love the old fantasy movie poster feel.
I think with reducing the contrast in the background would try direct the focus more towards the heroine and the title. Attached overpaint attempt. Looks a bit like the come out a haze.
The elements on slide with the descriptions could come more together to a scene. Overpaint attempt for illustration. Again with some haze and vertical gradients, for depth and to create contrast for the text.
you ever have that feeling like you know you have forgotten something but aren't sure what it was? That's how I felt about these illustrations. Like they were close to what I wanted but not quite sure how to bring it all together.
Your examples make them feel completed rather than abstract collages. big thanks
"Looks great and are parts of it traced or basically everything done freehand?"
None
of it is freehand, I can barely draw a figure. It is all traced. Some
of the models are from my 3d models that are posed and others are just
frankensteined collections of artwork and then I make some minor tweaks.
Usually when I turn from 2d into 3d I'll change a lot because I am more
confident working in 3d, but with 2d I'm not confident enough yet to
make major change to a pose without it looking weird. But after a couple
paintings I feel like I'm starting to get a better handle on it, so who
knows maybe in future I might actually concept in 2d first, whereas
usually I concept in 3d.
"Can also see some inspiration from the golden age of 'sand n' sandal' 50s 60s poster art, too."
yeah
I think that is the biggest source of inspiration for this whole
project in general. those movies are what define "adventure" to me.
"The
greek style text imo fits in to the setting or genre of your game,
maybe increase the lettering gold border slightly so "OF" is more
readable."
Pretty much copied Fabi's suggestion verbatim here, but it works so well it seems to be the optimal solution. Will see if I can keep this style throughout the next illustrations (a couple more to do). But I think I should mix up the color palette a bit and not go overboard on reds and oranges as it may set too grim of a tone.
can't spend to much time reviewing all the new things but like the 1st img & i feel like that belly/baseball dive hurts a lot even to look at sometimes, every-time i see it i say to myself that must hurt. i wouldn't know what to do for that atm but worth mentioning from an outsiders perspective. Cool to see it coming along and all the updates, the refinements are paying off.
that dive animation is still using my initial "just get it working" attempt. should be able to get it looking better with another go at it in future(hopefully). main thing is that i want it to feel like a hail-mary, "i dont want to get shot today" combat dive, and not an overly-choreographed hollywood ninja roll, if you know what I mean But for gameplay reasons it feels best if its pretty fluid, so getting the timing just right is key.
I did find the right timing, just that the animations don't match with it yet. worst case scenario if it looks stupid even after some more attempts I just use more magician dust to cover it up.
I like the title illustration! Definitely hits some heavy metal / Frazetta notes that fit the tone of the game. The color / text adjustments based on Fabi's comment really help. The second illustration isn't quite to the same level for me. The blue fella on the right is a bit too saturated and contrasts with the color pallet too much. Also the overall quality of the anatomy on that guy isn't up to the same level as the others. I feel like the font doesn't fit, but I have no specific recommendations there (use papyrus! -jk) aside from increasing the padding between the final line and the edge of the image.
I'll add these notes to my todo, completely agree with all of it. In same boat with the font too, I want something that is a little bold and readable but also has an old world quality to it, but kind of rough and primitive, not ornate.
I am gonna finish the last couple illustrations first but then will go back over each of them for a second pass. So sometime next week should update with this feedback.
this depicts one of the planned boss fights. A snake charmer and his cobra. But the cobra is a gorgon. There is also to be an army of normal cobras for gameplay purposes, but for this illustration I couldnt find a way to include the cobra army plus the charmer plus the gorgon and the hero without it being too cramped. took me three hours of experimentation to find a good composition. I wanted for the gorgon to be big enough to have some nice detail.
this setting is somewhere around babylon so its more of a moorish style. just messing around with some colors with her beading but will try to give her more of middle eastern vibe and less hindu.
i'm messing around with the design of the gorgon, I feel like she needs to have a color which works well with background. something in emerald or teal area seems about right.
The light shafts from screen left will eventually make some bands across her body. probably some incense smoke makes the air in here pretty thick.
foreground hero and the charmer and his drummers are still original photo bash pieces.
for the gorgons pose there is no way I could get anatomy or perspective close to right so i just quick posed a model in maya and then screenshot it to trace. just duplicate the skeleton and pose second pair of arms.
some WIP on this one. taking some time to experiment with design of the gorgon character. decided to remove extra arms. made overall slimmer and gave colors similar to a king cobra rather than teal.
Couldn't get her face to something I liked so for now I consider a shawl. But not totally in love with her design yet. I don't like to just add random things without reason, kind of liked idea that she just has some ornamental necklace which covers the front and headress and thats all. Have experimented with some other types of beads around the waist but always feels a bit off somehow. like tacked on, not natural. probably just been looking at it too long though so will just finish the scene and maybe looking at her with fresh eyes later I can come upon with something which makes me happier.
I think issue with design is that shape of her head with the head dress is like an oval which feels helmet like. but the rest of her is very curve and sinuous. So perhaps it should be more like a long flowing braid of hair with jewels to highlight its curving flow.
Okay finished this one and it took longer than all the others combined. had to come up with a new workflow and style. for this one i wanted to hand paint a lot with the gorgon character - e.g. not relying on just overpainting some photobashed stuff as much. But then it becoems a problem if I cannot paint to same quality as photobashed stuff I am using.
also when reviewing my previous illustrations it has a very digital feel. i tried a few natural media styles in art rage. water color looks pretty cool and is fun but i think for this game oil paint style has a good harshness to it that feels more in tone.
for the enemy design i am still not in love but its good enough. i managed to get a decent face, though perhaps her expression is too placid. but i have such a hard time doing faces, takes me many hours to get a non-alien looking face and then its like a house of toothpicks, one wrong move and its all coming down.
i think in terms of her color and balance it feels about right. And this gorgon is meant to be more like a beautiful goddess and less of a cursed abomination, compared to others.
she has a python pattern instead of cobra but i thought it just looked better in the illustration. I made a 3d model so I could apply texture pretty easily and pose it so was able to test out a few poses and snake skin patterns pretty easily.
the next illustration will be a bunch of character concepts. a handful of characters from each region of the game. To begin I've done line work for the hero characters, the Amazons.
Although this is being made more for marketing art, I am trying to make this actually be useful for concepts in the future once its time to make the 3d models. So I try to be clean and deliberate with the details (but its not all finished yet so disregard the block feet and hands)
The game is not like league of legends where each character is radically different in play-style, however each does have a archetype and so I've tried to design the characters to communicate this within the confines of pseudo-realism.
FInished with the pitchdeck art. I ended up not using some of the illustrations I made. Should have actually built the slides first because once going through it, becomes much easier to understand it from the potential viewers perspective. then i updated plan on what art is needed. most the stuff I made will be used one place or another though. Doing a dedicated week and a half to illustration made me more confident in 2d art skills and was a lot of fun. I think helped me think better as an artist as well.
Here is last illustration I did. Gilgamesh and Ereshkigal. I feel this is the best one I did and also the one that is most manual on my part. Gilgamesh is a lot of paint over from various images but Ereshkigal I did nearly from scratch. The anatomy is a bit fucked up - i did actually pose a 3d model but I couldn't make it work for the pose i wanted in illustration so I just did some stretch armstrong with her torso. People will only look at this for a split second so I didn't want to spend too much time - it's just there to give some first impressions and set a theme. Took me 2 and a half days already.
Okay so enough with the pitchdeck. Now I wait for some feedback on that from some experts and then I'll send it off to various publishers once the demo is completed.
On that front I am working on polishing the existing art content. As best I can do with just a couple weeks deadline. Starting with the main character, I am finishing up some of her outfit.
Let me backup - before diving back into the 3d art, I spent a couple days scheduling. This was part of the pitchdeck. I went through every task in the entire project and made my best time estimations. Right now the fastest possible estimate is over 400 days and a solid chunk of that is just character art.
It would be great to be able to hire some people to do some of that but plan has to be me doing it all. So what this means is that for each character model I need to be able to complete model, textures, rig, and animations to MVP in a week. So far I am usually hitting about that timeframe but its good to keep in mind because very easy to go overboard with the characters. There is desire to make each one as detailed as possible but I have to instead find a way to make them look as good as I can within such a short timeframe per character. Most important is to have a consistent style. If one is standout above the others then they look bad. but if they are all the same, people accept them as they are. just live with it if I'm not perfectly happy how some have turned out and keep moving forward.
So, back to the main character. Updating the geometry is first order of business. Some is still in progress:
Changes:
More detail on the wrist and shin guards. Its very basic modeling but I've put a little more attention into the silhouette and shape, and some little details like clasp should give an impression of higher detail from the third person perspective. But going in and actually modeling the little details of each small clasp is where I have to draw line because otherwise it will just take to long and details the player can never see.
Also made some minor tweaks to her face and figure. With the leather corset at a realistic size it makes her feel a bit stocky, so I shrunk the corset down to what her actual waist size would be. I noticed this seems to be done pretty often in AAA games - like the characters armor actually forms what would be silhouette for the naked body. I guess in real life people wearing armor always look a bit awkward.
Added some studs to bottom of sandals. will look cool when running. I dont think bronze studs would last very long because its kind of soft metal but whatever. its a cool idea.
I am trying to avoid sculpting as much as possible. but the leather corset will need some little creases which cannot easily be done with textures so I do some sculpting with that. Mayas remesh tool is pretty handy in helping me stay away from zbrush for little things like that.
The top I will do a little simulation in marvelous designer to make it more like some folded over peplon, so she looks more like a ancient greek and less like a stripper. Kind of want to change a few things about the outfit but people seem to like the character so its better if I don't endlessly tweak it just to suit my own taste.
Also finishing the hair. Will be keeping the pig tails but getting proper hair cards and textures instead of just a blocky mesh. Doing 3d hair is a big time sink though so I I am looking for ways to save time as far as possible on this. I've found two things which should save me some hours. One is that on artstation marketplace there is a number of super cheap hair packs. Naturally there is never anything exactly as you want, however if a bulk of hair cards is pretty close to what you need thats still hours saved compared to starting from scratch.
But the biggest help is a plugin called GS Curve Tools. With this I can easily convert those pre-made hairstyles to curves and then have procedural tools for generating hair cards with the curves. That allows me to gain the speed of working from a template but also have full creative control. Cut down a ton of the tedium, increase iteration speed, etc. Very handy.
Thats all for now - very exciting to dig into some art properly. Confidence boost because having leveled up my 2d skills a tad, now I feel that I can do more concepting that way, whereas I used to mostly concept in 3d, and relied more heavily on existing designs. For instance I had previously made the satyr archer character with a long tail, but realized i didnt like it only after testing in game. During illustration week I was able to sketch out a different styles.
Of course you can always sketch something regardless of skill but at least for me, if it does not look pretty close to the final thing I just cant judge if it will work or not.
trying to decide on the top fabric for the outfit. Left side has more fabric tucked in. for the most important over the shoulder view I think this gives a better shape. you see the curve of the back, she feels more athletic.
right side is actually pretty close to some historical statues of amazons which is kind of neat, and in the back view i like having that diagonal bit. it can be simulated which will look cool when moving. I think if you see that outfit in screenshot you immediately understand the theme and time period. But perhaps it kind of has "fancy diplomats in white togas" sort of connotations.
I can use both, but trying to make decision which will be the default and used in vertical slice.
As usual have a ton of things I wish to improve but going to stamp the good enough stamp on her outfit and textures for the current phase of the project.
Next I update the bows geo and textures and then dig into rehashing animations.
One major problem with animations in last iteration was that I did the bow draw, hold, release, and reload as separate animation files. This was mistake because if the begin/end are not perfectly matched it is noticeable when animations play in sequence in the game. It is possible to match them by copy and paste but it's a headache to have to do that. So this time I will author all animations that are part of a sequence as one file and then can split it up in unreal.
There is one animation to do which is going to be complicated, but I think it is time to do it now. When people play or see the game there needs to be some cool things they've never seen before (in a game at least). So since our heroes are meant to be badass archers, I wanted to have them shoot in this historical style which there is good chance the scythians (that's likely who the amazons actually were) probably used:
The animation itself may not be super complicated but it has to work in tandem with code so that we see the arrows being manipulated. Initial idea is to use IK in unreal to make some static mesh actor arrows stick to the hand. Because it is super fast animation it wont need to be fingertip precise but I think we have to see the arrow being seemingly drawn from hand for it to have a wow effect.
Will share a workflow here because was difficult to figure out:
How to add tattoos to a 3d character?
The first and probably most obvious choice is to use stencils in your texturing app and just manually paint the tattoos. Problem with this is that any tattoo which wraps around something like arm becomes very tedious as you have to carefully match borders and try to do so without it becoming messy and disfigured looking. It is very painstaking and slow and this leaves you with little flexibility if you want to change composition of the tattoos.
Would be better if the tattoos can more easily be shuffled around in a non-destructive way.
So then you might try some other forms of projection in the texturing app, but placement still is a tedious thing and you are stuck with your UV layout, which might not be ideal for tattoo placement in all areas. A workflow which depends on prior planning is not very flexible because cannot predict future needs.
So the best workflow I found is a bit of a chore as it involves several programs, however it does give good flexibility and flawless projection without any distortion.
Result:
Assuming the tattoo stencils are already made, the actual placement and
bake to textures took less than 30 minutes (once workflow was figured
out). And if it is necessary to change all tattoos or a single tattoo, this can be accomplished relatively easily - similar workload are if you retouched a sculpt and then bake a fresh normal map.
Steps:
1. Collect all of your tattoos to a single texture sheet. If you have tons of different image files for tattoos, drag drop them into a figma whiteboard and they'll be automatically arranged in a grid. Export that as png, and if further processing is needed you can do so in photoshop or similar.
2. In your 3d app, duplicate that characters body mesh. Select faces where a tattoo will go and duplicate the faces to a new mesh. Do camera UV projection and unfold this new mesh. Add new material that uses the tattoo texture collage. Now you can place the UV shell over the desired tattoo.
Major benefits of doing this here is that you can easily do things like flip the shell, or make a new shell which goes over shell border edges on the actual character mesh. So pretty much you can easily setup the tattoos however you please without any technical issues bogging down your creativity.
3. Once all the tattoos are placed you can combine to single mesh and export. The original idea was to bake the albedo / transparency texture from this to the original character mesh in toolbag, but problematic baking. A few issues not easy to solve. You do need to include a duplicate of the character mesh as a "ray blocker" in the high, along with the tattoos mesh, but even so I still got a lot of skewing and strange artifacts despite maxed out bake settings. So, one last step to get a perfect bake...
4. Convert the tattoo mesh texture to actual geometry for cleaner baking. Import tatoo mesh to zbrush and subdivide (without smoothing) to enough resolution to support convert the texture to polypaint. Convert texture to polypaint, then mask by polypaint, mask to polygroup, then hide the other polygroup and delete hidden. Now you are left with actual geometry of the tattoos. No need to make it thick or anything like that, just export as obj and now you can bake this.
5. In Marmoset Toolbag, just make materials albedo for the tattoos black and the "ray blocker" mesh to white. Do an albedo bake and you're done.
It's a lot of steps but its the only way I can find which doesn't require you to act like a surgeon with your tablet for every tattoo, which could easily consume a week and discourages iteration.
Replies
Shifted gears to some more techy stuff. Working on a tool to export objects by name from maya to a csv, and then in unreal this gets read and instanced static mesh components added for each.
The previous design was probably fine, however I have plenty of time before my first deadline and I think there are some major improvements that can be made both artistically and for gameplay.
I was having a lot of trouble finding good sizes that work for a lot of different temples shapes. What I learned is that rather than trying to come up with the small units first, define the largest units and then just divide them. Here is what I mean:
Using material instances it is possible to basically use inheritance but for materials. So I have a few hierarchies so that I can easily tweak value, color, and other parameters for various groups. For instance, I have all enemies sharing a common material, all enviro art another, pickups another, and so on. This way I can do things like make all enviro art slightly less saturated, pickups a little brighter, characters use an outline, etc, and only have to change a couple material instances, instead of dozens.
Some of this is showcased here:
I've just placed rocks along borders, and also reused the rocks with just a world aligned grass material to help make the paths look more detailed. I might just do it like this instead of using a landscape.
I found a quick way to make things look a little more complete and "tied together" is to add a couple overlay textures on top. These are also world space projected. Especially with things like rocks which might each have slightly different hues, this makes them all seem like they are growing together. You know how rocks grow.
There are plenty of other ways variety and interest could be added - like vertex painting to blend multiple materials- but for now I am trying to get as far as I can as fast as possible, so I'll avoid doing more manual labor like that until everything is in place.
temple of Hephaestus is on the hill and lower right is stoa of zeus.
For the text I want something thicker but with hard angles and slight askance like that. Haven't found an existing font yet so I might have to just paint it. Many of the greek themed fonts feel soft or cartoony, or have bad legibility.
I think with reducing the contrast in the background would try direct the focus more towards the heroine and the title.
Attached overpaint attempt. Looks a bit like the come out a haze.
The elements on slide with the descriptions could come more together to a scene. Overpaint attempt for illustration. Again with some haze and vertical gradients, for depth and to create contrast for the text.
Keep up the good work!
I think issue with design is that shape of her head with the head dress is like an oval which feels helmet like. but the rest of her is very curve and sinuous. So perhaps it should be more like a long flowing braid of hair with jewels to highlight its curving flow.