Bookshop Sim Dev blog

polysteve

Some friends and I were part of this year's studio layoffs so while we search for new jobs we decided to work on a game together! It's basically a simulator game where you run a book store, similar to TCG and Grocery Store Simulator but we've got some plans to push the genre farther. I've been mostly working on the architecture assets like for the procedural store upgrades and the exterior environment kit. We're still pretty early on in the dev process (started it about 4ish weeks ago) but this latest milestone we've made some awesome progress! Hoping to release the demo for the game mid-late January.

Current environment:

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We had to actually start with the inside of the shop so we can start playtesting as soon as possible so most of my time has been working on basic wall textures. Now that we have stuff for our engineers to work with I started working on the main building and blocking out the exterior. At my studio job I mostly worked on props and characters so it was nice getting to actually build an environment! You can't go far outside in the game but you can walk around a bit so I wanted to make it feel really cozy. The lighting has not been touched and there is no post processing yet so it's a bit washed out

We really want to avoid using asset packs since our team is pretty big for this kind of project (2 Artists and 2 engineers). Most of the things I make have modularity in mind. Lots of material effects and things made for the grid

The art style is really quick and simple since we have such a short dev cycle, it's mostly generic stylized techniques in maya and zbrush (trim dynamic and clipping brush ftw). In substance we have some blocky brush alphas that we layer subtle color and roughness breakup and we add a pretty strong AO to the color, usually purple.

 Will post more updates soon and some of the other devs will use this to post their stuff so keep an eye out! Feel free to give any feedback or questions about what we're doing!

alexdudleyart

Hello, artist # 2 here! I've been working on props mainly, and some tiling textures like the floor and the storage room ceiling. We are focusing on the essentials for the mvp at first, then we will move into creating more variety. The books will be the main product, and we intend to begin with some silly parody titles. I'm still playing around with different woods to see what fits the style more. The desk and the two shelves were the only materials made from a substance material base for the wood grain, and I'll probably remake them once I decide on the look. Any feedback is welcome!

polysteve

Updates for the week! Lost some time to the holidays last week but we're back and recharged by turkey! Added some more assets to the kit including some foliage shader work

alexdudleyart

Updated the wood materials to get the more placeholder stuff out. Also added Bookmarks and a display table for them. Then I added the paint bucket item for customizing the walls and floors, and a shelf for them.

polysteve

Some big updates over the holidays! The biggest one being we switched over to HDRP to do some lighting testing and benchmarking. Project is definitely getting close to being finished! Will post some gameplay footage soon as we start putting stuff together for nextfest

still have to work on some decals and smaller objects to make the street more lively but as far as the architecture goes it's done!

We also did some example lighting tests for benchmarking and style exploration



and the final architecture assets. We really got a lot of environment for so few which is my favorite part of level art XD

Eric Chadwick

Loving this!

You might want to revise the wood floor texture, I think it's too high in contrast which pulls visual attention away from the items in the room. Reducing the size of the gaps would help.  

This is a great dissection on how to make a realtime environment more "readable" by players: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Defining_the_Rift’s_Visual_Style

alexdudleyart

Thanks for the feedback! Great point and I'll keep that in mind for further floor options. We are still adding more props! and did a switch to HDRP, still working on lighting, it needs to behave with the outdoor sun/moon light as well.

alexdudleyart

Also made this over the holidays for an in progress YouTube tutorial. We are thinking about ideas for legendary artifact books that you will be able to acquire.

polysteve

Also realized we haven't really shared much on gameplay, should probably do that once we have some UI in  . Speaking of, we've started doing some mockups for UI, it will probably be temporary until the final version release but for now it's this. The logo is also not even close to final but the vibes are here

trying to do something simple that has some fun little interactions. We have cats in the game of course so using them will be fun XD.
Some screens of the gameplay will have to do for now. I only did the wall patterns for this, Alex will have to forgive me showing his stuff lol

We have purchasing and shelving books implemented. Shoppers will come in, pick out books, take them to the cashier, and buy them. All the cashier stuff also works and you can hire people. We're mostly working on animations and gameplay balance atm as well as some bug fixing and refactoring on the engineering side. And at some point we have lots and lots of books to make lol