'Ssup ! Day 4
Nothing really relevant done today I think. I have redone the interactive totems 'cause the last ones were ugly. These ones will feature a "validation button" with the main left-right rotation to avoid people doing random combinations too easily.
Plus the bridge can now open and close because I think it's important to be able to activate and desactivate at will as many things as possible
About the art workflow now.
As this started as a studies assignment, the scene had to be optimized as fuck, meaning the least amount of drawcall possible. This is what led me to this style. Flat colors are easy to make and tweak, and combines with low poly, you get less boring unwraps to make. Plus I wanted to try bringing to 3D
what I use to do with Illustrator in 2D .
I got scared as hell by drawcalls since my work on
S.W.A.G. where we didn't take 'em into account with the programmer. So basically, it's just a gigantic color atlas made of pixels. It's simple as hell, but all these trees, bushes and grass here are theoretically 1 drawcall (wich is not because some trees have scripts. But still). I have just discovered that this way I can also easily change the color values of the whole world in-game, as a manual color correction. I definitely have to try this out one day.
For the architecture and non-natural elements, it's a more classic workflow, but the meshes are made the simpliest and squariest way possible again not to spend to much time on UVs and to be able to reuse the same textures as much as possible.
There's basically nothing smart here, it's just that I focused on choosing the style that would fit the most my intentions in terms of tech and optimisation. I don't like when devs are not thinking enough about the big picture of what the game will look like, if they're not good enough for what they envision, it will be stupidely hard for them to acheive their goal.
Here's my advice, I want complicated things too, but I keep on trying to find the easiest way to acheive this goal.
- I want nice shadows -> Lights are expensive ? -> I can make the shadows on the textures !
- I want to make a huge island with tons of trees -> Not enough time ? -> Let's try low-poly, plus the UVs will not be a pain
- I want everything to be moving, breathing -> Won't the computer break ? -> flat shading + low-poly = atlas frenzy + batching everywhere
And it's only then that it's possible to think of what setting/assets/world you can build out of this. And the cool thing is that if you start from the easiest things, then you'll reach faster the cool part about adding content.
There you go, I'll work tomorrow on the GUI. If i'm done I talk a bit about design ideas, otherwise I have some cool things to share about the day and night cycle.