Something new

Where've I been? "Who cares!?!" Awe, you hurt my feelings internet! I'm sensitive and vulnerable. Ok now that I got that out of the way... I put Misadventure on hold. "The HELL you say!" I do say, or don't. I don't know how to answer that. I put in my notice and in a little more than 2 weeks I'll be a full-time indie game developer! Hurray for no paycheck! Wait, what? Oh, better get on that. Right! So, here's where I'm at. I have a fun idea for a VR game, and have been in the process of play testing and blocking out features. That's right, its already playable. "You mean you did this one the right way?" Well I'd like to think I started more righter than other times, yes. I'll post something to see soon. Its a short dev cycle so the whole process should be rather snappy. "Oh tell us more!" Really you want to know more? "No I haven't even read this far!" Ok. Well then, more to come soon.

Helmets, Armor, Weapons, Shields Skeleton Enemy Type

Material work not done but I got Armor working via socket snapping... well all this is socket snapping, yay! Lot of texturing work to do, but I wanted to knock these out to get them in game for development purposes. I think integrating this system will be a lot of work. Not to mention the color system that needs to work in the materials to show enemy Str.
I've been steadily improving the Skeleton b/c it will be one of the main enemies. Here is version 09


I also made a "dumb" Blueprint heart=health system that is probably a just for now system before we implement a nicer one.

Some New Animations

Working on a lot of things at the moment and being somewhat lazy in posting about them on my dev blog. Tisk tisk. Well here's a few things, this is new simpler Todd who looks better in VR with some single arm +shield animations. Also threw the sword swing fx in there. It shows some smoothing is needed for the animation.

New House Kit

Getting all materials/textures for the house on 1 texture atlas, getting each part in decent shape... its coming along. Starting to build houses, each one will be faster as each one makes more parts. This is different from the previous house kit in that the textures are not baked per asset part, and its simpler, less details, trying to get it more readable for VR. 

Roofs

Update is roofs and how I make them. You can see the old house and how the new roofs are simpler, less detailed more cartoony. This was a needed fix for VR, has to be easier to read in shape and silhouette.

First Look VR re-design

This took a month to get "right" as in getting it to this level of blocking. I can't say how performant this is ATM, but I just found out I'm getting my Vive Pre Friday! Its going to be a bit tricky to manage Andrew and myself sharing one when we don't live within hand off range. But we'll have a DK2 to play back up.  

Ground is not textured, especially in "town". I don't mind the simple colors but the town needs a better ground texture. I experimented with actual modeled floor but thats probably not worth the 20k polys it took to look fair. So finally back to a good place. The gear switching from normal game to VR was not insignificant.

Definitely still learning what size is too small and how much detail feels good. This is just where I'm at right now. Hope to make a video of this area with walking character tonight

The Big Change: VR

Took a step back over the holidays to re-evaluate. Andrew and I agree that we'd be idiots not to make a game in/for VR. I work in VR everyday using Unreal with the Vive. Why would I NOT use that skill set to make something fun? We're scaling back the features that were going to be to give us more iteration time for menus and controls in VR. Dropping the complex inventory system, in favor of simplified one... as just a small example. The game is developing as we go. Andrew still needs a headset, and I only have the DK2 at home, so we're working on getting him one. We also need a Vive or Crescent bay to be able to test quality to performance ASAP. Its hard to know what level of detail is needed or can be obtained until we get one of those headsets.
Here a look into the blocking I'm working on this AM.