Game Development.

Development blog for an aztec-themed steampunk game project, titled ST:YX as part of a university degree course.

[strangetides]

(Things are on hold while I complete my Master’s degree, but I have some plans for a complete overhaul of Strange Tides based on skills and things I’ve made over the Bsc and Msc studies I’ve been doing.)

[strangetides]

Current game development portfolio for 2016 & 2017

[strangetides]

A Brief Update

While posts have been quiet lately with my focus being on completing my Bsc at university, in a few weeks I'll be making some updates to this blog showing improvements and new things related to this demo. One of the main things has been the overhaul of the combat damage and camera target locking, I won't go into too much detail now but in the near future I'll be writing a discussion post on why the previous tutorials on combat and targeting are bad and how they were improved. I'm also currently planning a youtube tutorial on these new systems, where I'll be not only explaining how they work and how to write them in blueprints, but also the thought process behind them - to create a different sort of tutorial rather than just a "Do this to solve it." The previous tutorials will remain up, just edited to include a link to updated versions. As for actual content posts, I decided to avoid posting things here that were being discussed or included in any university submission to avoid complications on my end, but will soon be posting updated content for Strange Tides and my portfolio work. My portfolio is also live, currently using Adobe's creative cloud portfolio website, a sketch up will also be set up in the future too. Lastly, during the last 4 weeks of university my CPU began to break, while I managed to force my PC to boot up by resetting to BIOS each launch (sometimes taking a few hours), it finally gave up on the day after my final submission (Tuesday). Things have been quite busy trying to get things running for the end of year show over the last three days, but once I return from a short holiday I'll be getting the computer running again to provide blog, portfolio and game content. Thanks!

[strangetides]

Business cards and USB stick business cards! It's been a great few days showing off last year's Strange Tides level, a new prototype map and a 2-day dungeon map using the modular asset packs and functions created this year at University.

[strangetides]

Strange Tides on display at the Confetti showcase, alongside Akshay Soni's "What Once Was" horror game and Alex Capewell's recreation of the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham

[strangetides]

Not completely happy with this since it's not great but I've got performance to consider and don't want to spend too long on just the foliage.

Marking it as "complete" on my to-do list and returning to UV mapping and texturing the island. Will probably return to foliage at some point in the future, to add things like reeds and lilly grass, twigs and dead leaves etc. However for the moment, for beta/alpha builds, it’s enough in Strange Tides. Will continue learning more foliage techniques in 3D/2D software and engines. Particularly fond of the last screenshot, for no other reason than it looks rather nice. Need to add in an alpha texture and blur the edges a little, clean up that bit on the big mushrooms that are making it look repetitive. Won't be able to use only 1 texture map since alpha channel seems to ditch the data I need, but otherwise getting there. Each mushroom has gone from 50-100 polys down to 5 single poly planes lol. My texture map is set up with enough room to drop in new plants etc without moving any UVs or textures around. -Should- hopefully future proof me.

[strangetides]

Been teaching myself foliage tonight and I'll say this: Grass is an ass and we won't be working with it again.

The 2D mushrooms have come out quite nicely, while the 3D mushrooms aren't detailed enough for me. Using 5 polys isn't enough for the 3D ones, but in total I've gone from 700,000 polys to 100 polys pre-cluster. Considering I'm going to cluster them up, and then most likely will be spreading out 1,000 instances, that's a, erm, FUCKING HUGE reduction.

My grass textures are too dense, while my grass clusters aren't dense enough. Won't take long to clean up, overall a decent learning experience. Grass -is- a total ass though.

I'm going to change the | | configuration of the mushroom stems to a X formation. No reason for me not to have set up an X formation in the first place but at this point I'm blaming it on being tired.

Not pictured in the game video, but I was honestly expecting the ferns to mess up too, considering how extreme the normal map in that section is. In an effort to save not just polys, but texture draw call frame-rate and overall file size, all the foliage objects are being set up to fit on one 4k map. Tempted to reduce this to 2k.

Also not pictured, is that I'll be sticking the Alpha map for opacity into the alpha channel of the diffuse maps, again to save space and calls.

Overall, a good experience in foliage creation - Using 3ds max, photoshop & crazybump. I may also use Xnormal for the resized 3D mushroom tops or test out simply having 2D ones. However, 3D mushroom tops will allow me to have them above the grass and look decent without clipping. Alternatively, I could use a flat 2D plane for the top, two planes in a X for the side of the mushroom tops, and an X for the stem. That would be less on resources, but will need testing to see if it looks good enough for me.

I'm going to create just a mushroom cluster, just a grass cluster, and just a fern cluster, plus some mixed variations. Should have enough with that to create a decent amount of variety in the level.

Next step is to just fix the grass and larger mushroom caps.

What I really want to do is add an emissive texture for the mushrooms, but not sure how the game would handle that in regards to resources since lighting is so heavy. Ideal world, emissive mushrooms using UE4's function to also light nearby meshes via emissive channels, and add some bloom post-processes from the mushroom glow as well. This would theoretically solve some of the lighting issues I've been thinking solutions for, however will need testing in practice to see how heavy on resources it will end up being.

Having foliage and textures on the island will be an absolute huge step towards getting the final boss battle looking good.

[strangetides]

5th attempt and 4 hours later, my lock on function finally handles multiple enemy types - and doesn’t flip out.

[neilmakesgames]

Key Scamming And Reselling: Indie Dev Hints

Key scamming and grey market key reselling is big business now. Capital B Big Business really. Just look at TinyBuild. This post isn’t about charge backs, or how any one company lost big m…

[neilmakesgames]

I think I know what was causing so much trouble in Blender last night.

I was trying to make a character by joining cubes for the head, body, and legs, when I should’ve started with one cube and extruded the other body parts from the main cube.

Then I would’ve had all the right vertices for unwrapping the mesh.

I’ll try again this weekend.

[strangetides]

I’m assuming you’re trying to keep good edge loops throughout? I try to use symmetry for base meshes as much as possible in 3DS Max, I think the same principles could be applied to Blender. The other option would be to build the character mesh regardless of loops and use a retopology tool/sofware to create a better target mesh.

[strangetides]

Extremely confused about installing PhysX so I can add some Apex Cloth to Unreal, the documentation just yields this?

[strangetides]

Every time I open Unreal engine I cannot navigate the editor or use any menus. In other news some of my Unity text books for the next year of my degree have arrived.

[strangetides]

Moved into a new flat, no Internet yet so lack of uploads. Looking into apex clothing, garment marker, creating clothing and organic/natural shapes in Max. Also going to be experimenting with my own displacement maps to create chain mail and whether to do high detail sculpts in Max, Mudbox or Maya. Also need to determine whether unreal can handle the geometry generated by garment maker or whether I'll have to retopologise. I'll probably get a non-cloth physics model into my current build once the Internet is up and running in order to test some archer blueprints I'll be writing soon. This will being the enemy types in the first level to 3 and a boss enemy.

[strangetides]

I’ve been having to work full time recently in the job that puts food on the table due to staff shortages. Unfortunately that means progress on Strange Tides has been slow. I still intend and believe myself to be on track to complete the Boss Fight part of the demo before the next public showing, due to having already accounted for the possibility of delays, but those delays have been earlier than expected. The show will go on! I’m looking at adding some ranged enemies and some form of displacement attacks for the player to avoid, but the boss and new weapon sets are looking good in their WIP state. Thanks.

[kikouille-master]

Reblog if you're a game developer

Whether you’re indie or AAA, for consoles or computer, I want to follow you and get to know you !

[strangetides]

New weapons for Strange Tides.

[strangetides]

Spent a couple hours this morning making this. Originally I wanted to make an axe out of an anchor - extending the top and having it sort of like a pickaxe, but didn't like that at all. The anchor was supposed to fit into the nautical/pirate part of the combination/mix of themes Strange Tides is operating within. However, since the end-boss woman has a Persian war mask, and I've drawn some inspiration from the Sand Snakes in Game of Thrones (Except the whole exploding into a huge monster of claws, spikes etc part I'm planning to get done >.>') So, I decided to mix to two and create a Persian-style battle but keep a certain degree of the anchor-shape on the blade of the axe. I've tried to make it subtle and I think I've pulled it off. Quickly put it into Quixel to slap some textures on it, and here is that result. I promise I haven't -just- been playing Pokémon GO and have done some dev work...