lovely man. How long have you been working on this project? And is the end goal to be purely an environmental walk-around or will you integrate some kind of interactive component. Not making a suggestion either way, just curious.
I think it's been over two and a half years now... but I've probably put around a couple of months worth of actual work into this. I had zero experience of 3d programming when I started and much of the math involved had long since been forgotten, so a big part has been just (re)learning those. It's been fun though.
The initial idea was just to provide a interesting and atmospheric virtual world to explore. That's what I enjoy the most in other games. At one point I was thinking of adding buildings and other human made objects to explore and interact with but it just seems to be so much more work if done properly. So for now, I'll keep it simple and probably create a couple more nature scenes alongside that winter one.
In the meantime, there's some neat use of muted colors here, but the sort of plastic look of the objects' edges bothered me. Felt like it detracts from the therapeutic value.
If you want to add anything more gamelike, consider different ways of accessing places, like some flying powerup that's hidden in the game world. It can do just fine without goal-oriented gameplay, I think, you just need to have things to discover.
Hmm, I think I understand what you mean by the plastic look. Are you referring to the objects in general and how the hard texture edges are? Or for example the small spruces? Those ended up looking especially plastic due to a combination of the low res alpha tested textures and the actual color choices.
Agree about having more things to discover. That's one of the problems with the winter scene, not enough variety. One of the things I have thought about is to sprinkle unique locations/objects in the world for player to discover.
Wow. The winter scene is stunning. It's strange - I've seen scenes that are more 'realistic', but somehow the slight pixelation and lack of details in your gif feels much more evocative and closer to memory.
Thanks. Was going for the overall feel of the place and tried to subordinate much of the detail that wasn't necessary.
Here's a rough summer scene mockup (looks a bit too cartoony). That pixelated stripe on the right is supposed to be a radio tower but the mipmapping is pretty much killing it.
Aerial shot of the latest scene.
Any tips/tools for manually painting skyboxes in PS/Gimp/etc.?
Community
