Breaking Bad Blogging Part 2: The Rebloggening

I'm actually doing art again! Templar has really been taking off so here's an entire post to his progress.

ReTemplaring

I've been playing around with different art styles and what I want with the feel of the game. Consequently, Templar's been in need of a little bit of a re work.

So I started with these;

And they were all well and good and all, but with the change in art direction, Templar had a bit too much detail. This meant it would take far too long to actually get him in game to the level I'm chasing.

So I took him back to the drawing board;

I started with the stereotypical hero pose. A step in the right direction but not quite there yet. I want him to very visually convey his playstyle in game, namely being able to take a lot of hits and hardly flinch.

He looks like he's an NBA all-star

At this stage, I decided on strong silhouettes and flat colours with cell shaded lighting for the visual style for the rest of the game. Templar needed a stronger silhouette to complement his playstyle.

Next Stop: Maya!

Then he got a sword and shield,

In a bit of homage to the old painting, I took him back to photoshop to finish him off. 

This is ultimately what I'm aiming for with the art style. He's much more visually distinct than his earlier versions and is finally in game. Apart from some animations, he's completely done.

More content is coming soon, I'm working on some enemies and environment assets to get in game.

Update: July Is Crunch Month

So that basically means there will be changes to my pipeline over this month.

Context?

My work partner, Alex, wants to have a working test build of the game done by the end of the month so he can get some tweaking done to the core gameplay.

This means I need to crunch hard to pump out a whole load of assets for this test.

So Get To The Point Already

I will be halving my sprint timelines to a sprint per week. Quality isn't as big of a factor this month just so long as it is functional for the test build deadline we set out for us.

So!

Starting this week is a premature end to sprint 4, and the first of the Crunch Sprints for this month. 

Goals for Crunch Sprint 1 (CS 1?)

1. Basic Rig for anklebiter enemy (including skinned mesh and IKs(Inverse Kinematics, I don't really have time to explain so here)
2. Basic Animations for said anklebiter including
1. Idle
2. Run
3. Attack
4. Death

TL;DR

July is the month in which lots of assets are going to be churned out so that the game this is going towards has something to go from. I'm going to run myself into the ground trying to get all of this out and working.

Lots of coffee will be consumed to sate my needs.

In the meantime, here's the fruits of Sprint 4 before it was cut.

First bit of production art done! The character portrait for Templar.

I suppose you could say CS GO!

See you next week/sometime sooner if I finish the CS goals before then!

Jason