This sprint was all about visual design. So it was super fun. The hard part was to find time to spend working on my project. Between all the travel, visiting friends and family, I didn’t get my “alone” time. But I managed to squeeze in some hours and got few things done.
TLDR
- I started doing the concept art for the game. I can’t show anything as of now because I haven’t done much yet.
- Created a dummy block of a 3D scene to test shaders.
- Replaced capsules with somewhat monster-like enemies
- Added some visual flare to bullets.
So let’s begin.
Concept art
I have an overall vision for how I want the game to look, but I haven’t pinned it down. I have curated some great work from other artists, but I have to start detailing each part of the game world, one by one.
I did some sketches for a test environment which became the 3D scene. I found it helpful to first draft a layout on paper before creating a scene. It looks like I’ll stick to this workflow until I find something better.
Building the world
The game in the current form is pseudo-isometric with a fixed camera angle. But I think in the future, the camera angle will be something one can adjust even if it’s in a limited capacity.
It will be a 3D game, but I would love it to have a visual style, somewhat of a painting. I curated some art from few great artists, and I love their style.
I can, of course, paint individual models to give it a lovely flat, painted look. I love doing that since I’ll have a lot of control over the intended effect. But I have to be realistic about it. Being a solo designer with a very limited time budget, the amount of time it would take to paint every 3D asset in the game is unreasonable. I need to be smart about this.
Enter: Shaders
I have never programmed a shader before. It feels alien to me. But Unity has released a node-based programming environment for shaders — Shader Graph. That made programming them much more accessible. I already have programmed a shader with it to make an object visible through the foreground environment.
My hope is that I will be able to model all the environment, props, characters, and set pieces in low poly and use flat textures and simple gradients to color them. Then I would create a shader that can give the intended effect of a painting. I don’t know how this is going to go, but fingers crossed.
For now, I have created a 3D block of a scene with verticality, a place for a waterfall and river, a tree (this was a free asset), and ghostly looking tree tower. It also has an NPC character at the top, a lift mechanism near the waterfall, and a small stone structure. They all are throw-away models created to test shaders.
I’ll be working with this piece for quite some time.
Enemies look like monsters now
I had a capsule to represent the enemies earlier. Now I have them look like… not sure… something… At least it has more character now!
I modeled this within Unity using Pro-Builder. I didn’t want to spend more time designing it as I have no clue what this will turn into eventually. (Can you see a running theme here? I have no clue what I am building :) )
I positioned the eyes to make it look up a bit. That way, it read better with an isometric camera angle. And, of course, they float because it saves me from rigging the legs.
So, there it is… Enemy number Uno!
Visual flare to bullets
Earlier, the bullets appeared like a block just zipping around. It didn’t read at all when I played the game. So I added particles to the shots and created a trail. Now it looks better at speed.
I am not happy with the result of it just yet. But there are a lot of things up in the air at the moment. So things will become clear as I develop the world a bit more because it may turn out that these are not bullets at all, but are plasma, or fire, or even spells!
Next step
Next week, I’ll be adding sound effects for the different interactions I programmed previously and try to refactor the code a bit.
It was a tiring week for me, mostly because I couldn’t work enough on this. Hopefully, things will turn around soon.
That is all for this week. See you next time.
I wish you very well!
Originally published at https://www.theearlyowl.com on October 9, 2021.
