Bookstore Sim Dev blog
polycounter lvl 4
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 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!