So I've kinda been in a bit of a creative rut recently. I've been doing other creative things like mini painting away from the screen, but I really wanted to itch the personal project itch recently. I've tried restarting 3 different environment projects recently and got to varying stages, but something wasn't quite clicking. Don't get me wrong I love the ideas for all 3 of them but none of them were really holding my interest for long & I couldn't figure out why. That was until I took part in Global Game Jam... Except unlike previous attempts I decided I would give solo dev a go. The joy of creating something that you can then play through was f**king solid! That was the itch!! Life got busy after that, but now we are here!

Let's make a 3D platformer! 🥳

In my game jam game I really wanted to focus on mechanics that weren't violent, and that gave me a nice constraint. I wanted to have a similar constraint for this one, but being a platformer I needed to warp it a bit... Which lead to 'No Killing', enemies will never be destroyed from the level, but could be stunned. This means you can still have the satisfying moment of stopping an angry little gremlin in it's tracks, but you would need to consider that in a set amount of time that little nuisance would be up and being a pain again :D

So far I have a pretty basic setup with a few mechanics in a small dev sandbox. I've got the movement into a place that I'm happy with, and I've started to sort out some of the other features that will add complexity to the game. So what are they??

Main features:

• Gathering & "Crafting"
  • This went through a few iterations with at time the design being close to Minecraft's setup and at others removing it all together. What I've settled on for now is a pretty simple loop that shouldn't slow down gameplay too much:
    • Gather resources from around the map
    • Interact with a Workbench
    • If you can deposit all the needed materials, boom enjoy your tool!
  • I've started to map out some ideas for potential tools, different resources, as well as, how they might work together.
• Tool based mechanics
  • Tools! Not weapons...
  • These will allow the player to alter navigation, outsmart enemies or collect new resources!
    • There are a tonne of cool ways to move around levels that can come into play through this
      • Gliding
      • Wall Climbing
      • Jump Pads
      • Special Resource Collection
      • etc, etc...
  • I've got these setup on a basic trigger swap through atm, but I want to get a feel for how the game plays and see if this needs changing or if maybe something like a time slow will help switching these feel good

• Collectibles
  • Classic coins
    • For purchasing cosmetics outside levels and for things like signposting inside the levels
  • Blueprints
    • Locks and unlocks tools throughout progression
    • Helps with re-playable areas that are locked off in early sections of gameplay
  • Cosmetics
    • I want to have cosmetics you can collect in level as well as purchase, because finding a secret nook and unlocking a sweet outfit is really cool imo!
  • Storybook Pages
    • This will link into the larger layout of levels, collecting enough of these will unlock the last level of an area.

Onwards...

Between starting to write this and posting I made some more progress and now have a stunnable enemy! Here's a quick vid in action, CHECK OUT ALL THE PLACEHOLDERS 😎😎😎 Enjoy the video and maybe see you in a week or so! 👋👋

I reckon this Bi-weekly updates might be a good push moving forward! It gives me more time to develop the scene between posts and means that I can take these reflective moments for larger chunks of the scene. So I more or less did exactly what I mentioned I would be doing in the last post over the last couple weeks. 

The major additions are:

• Revamped overhead wiring
• Added Stairway and railing assets
• Smaller tweaks to lighting

Adding Edge Decals for the Stairs

One of the techniques I wanted to play with some more with this project was mesh decals both for greebles on things like the door frames and the edge of the concrete parts of the scene. I did a small decal trim sheet for the door ways as I showed in my previous post and I've taken this further with the stairway. I made a set of 5 sculpted edge wear decals for the concrete/plaster to break the shape up a bit more, but I had a couple issues along the way.

I started running through the process creating a box and bringing it into ZBrush to sculpt appropriate edge wear for concrete/plaster and then reduced the poly count of these to get them baked down in Painter. This all went pretty well and the normals came out nicely, however the issue came when I got into UE4. The initial basic opactiy map was too big and causing issues where the entire trim washed out the steps beneath it looking odd (second pic in below). I had to return to the opacity and play with the normal channels to get some better information to build my opacity map from. I tweaked it with levels and painted over a few areas but ended up with something that was tighter (pic on the right).

The new opacity is considerably better and isn't nearly as destructive! I played with normal blending between the normal of the material below, which is using a world space texture. This came with a varying level of success where it worked at some angles but not for others. I decided to cut my losses and focus down on the opacity.

I'm planning on implementing the same edge decals with a bit of vertex painting to the areas the walls meet the ceiling & floor. I also noticed a few areas on the stairs that would benefit from the edge decals as well where it interacts with the floors.

Leonardo Lezzi's tutorial on Normal Edge Decals has been a big help in this whole process! (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l3wwa)

Breaking down the Wiring

The original blockout wiring is using a spline actor in UE4 and for the most part it did the job, but I wanted to add points that fastened the wires to the ceiling and figured it would be easier to use splines in 3DS Max with these areas to get better areas of interaction. Personally as well I've found the splines in 3DS max seem to react in a more predictable controllable manner than the Spline Component in UE4.

I started by building in the splines in a basic blockout of the scene in Max considering where I wanted wire to interact more and trying to give the wiring a bit more of a noisy slapdash appearance than the more refined setup of the blockout.

Once I'd got the wiring added I looked to add in hooks and cable ties to ground the wiring and give it more weight. I created the cable ties and baked them down to a plane and then created the hooks with a basic low poly and face-weighted normals to get a sharper looking low poly with no need for a normal map. The textures of the wires were kept basic and created in Designer in a fashion that they could then be squashed into a single unified sheet and still look the correct size.

I tweaked the thickness of the wiring a few times, and after some feedback I feel I may have made them too thin. I'm going to be briefly returning to the wires over the next couple weeks to react to this feedback and push them further. :D

Minor Lighting Tweaks

I haven't really updated the lighting since the first couple of blog posts. I really wanted to aim where possible to use a majority of static lights and include dynamic lighting only where completely necessary. With this in mind another piece of feedback was on the lighting and that it was just looking a bit flat. I looked over the scene and made a few tweaks to some of the world settings, including adding things like AO. This coupled with making sure that some of the more unnecessary dynamic lights where either converted or removed helped to bring the scene up a bit more. 

There's still a way to go with the lighting, but I want to add a couple more of the scene defining features before I tackle this properly. Things like the posters and the emissive pads will play a big part in the composition & lighting respectively of the scene. I'm going to prioritise getting these in and then have a go at tweaking the lighting further. I want to really see if I can get the scene light primarily by the emissives so this will be an interesting hill to overcome, but Polygon Academy's tutorial should be a massive help with this! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVPuvCAEz4Q)

Feedback to iterate on

I had a couple comments on the scene and what may need improving after posting it on the Experience Points Discord. Another set of eyes is always a godsend on a scene and hearing some of the issues from another person helps with scene blindness for sure! With that some of the things I'm either getting through tweaking or will be looking at tweaking over the next couple weeks are as follows:

• Break up the top border of the painted plaster more as it's too uniform at the moment
  • I'll need to jump back into Designer and tweak the material to get this sorted, but it shouldn't be much work to fix!
• Wiring doesn't carry much weight and looks too neat
  • The plan is to come back to the wiring, add in a few more wires and make some of the existing wires a bit chunkier. The additional wires will need to push more chaos into the wiring layout.
• The ceiling is pretty bare at the moment and the 'boxy' layout is easy to read.
  • Wiring should help with this as bit, and the edge decals as well. I've got some plans to utilise some decal stuff from the Quixel library and textures.com as I wanted to play implementing premade information in my scenes a bit more. This should really help breaking it up a bit more, but may end up being a much later stage.

What's Next?

Lots to keep working on! Looking at adding a rough blockout of the poster designs and then spending some time on the Door pads as I have a much more different idea for these to what they currently look like. From there it's more open on what's next, but I'll fill ya in with how it went in a couple weeks time! :D

Here's the continuation of the development GIF:

It's been longer than I had hoped between this and the last update! Haven't got nearly as much done as I had hoped, but reckon I'll be calling it on the blockout so I can start building assets and pushing this further!

Since the last update:

Initial Steps:

After the last update I gathered the image and ideas I had an did a brief paint-over to quickly visualize what needed tweaking and adding to the scene in its current state. Some of the major issues were to do with adding a bit more noise to the scene and breaking up some of the straight lines to add more visual interest. Another major hurdle to overcome was just how dark it kept coming out. The image on my screen was coming out great, but after looking on my phone and running the image through Photoshop to check levels it was clear that it just wasn't bright enough! The paint-over is below:

Post Paint-over Work:

From here I went through and made most of the changes I mentioned above. There's more noise in the scene now, and there aren't so many unbroken lines. Adding in an exponential height fog was a big help whilst I was playing with the lighting (there's a nice comparison below) as it really helped mellow out some of the harsher dark areas and bring the overall value in a bit more. There is some general gun shell clutter near the focal entry point to help start thinking about what might have happened in the scene. As well as this I've started to consider further clutter in my planning document with additional notes beneath my general and reference to support them. I really like the idea of having a couple bodies in the scene to help push the story of a HQ just raided and push scale some more. I've managed to find a decent looking model that could be used for this, and I'll look into getting this posed and into the scene in a bit.

What's next:

From here the plan is to make some final alterations this evening (maybe tweaking the lighting one more time...🙃) and then get cracking with the asset creation for the scene. Some of the major notes are adding in some more of the clutter information to build the scene up a smidge more, and potentially breaking up the wall further to get some more direction to the left side as well. I reckon I might try getting the character I spoke about earlier in for this final push as well as they'll make a fair amount of difference in the scene. 

In the meantime here's the progress GIF so far because who doesn't LOVE a progress gif... 🎉🎉

Time has bit a little more sparse this week, but I'm getting small bits done! I've added in a couple new meshes since the last update and also tweaked some of the existing blockout meshes as well. I spent some time collecting a bit more reference for Cyberpunk themes, and decided that some pieces just weren't hitting the theme properly. I've made tweaks to fix this from reference. There was a big look at more of the Cyberpunk 2077 for a push in the right direction.

Addition log:

• Stairs tweaked to add bannister
• More pipes added and wires altered to bring into focus point
• Light sources added
• Door panels added
• Door frames and Doors have been tweaked to better match the aesthetic
  • Sliding doors instead. The idea being doors would have been updated with improved tech
• A quick value pass to start getting a better idea for the value of assets in the scene rather than a single grey

Plan from here is to do a quick look over the current setup and a brief paintover. I want to see where I'll be placing things like posters, and start thinking about damage decals I might need to create. On top of this I'm going to start considering where the lighting can be tweaked to improve the scene as it is (I know for a fact the whole thing is a little too dark at the moment!).

I have also started a progress GIF and will look to try and update this every couple of additions...

I'd love to get the blockout finalised for the end of the weekend, but a busy weekend ahead may stop this! We shall see... 👀😁🤖

As I'm sure you've seen by now there Dinusty/Experience Points Cyberpunk Challenge has started! I'm sticking my head into this one as it should come with it's own merits and challenges! Looking forward to getting stuck in with this one and building something a bit more industrial and angry looking than the previous scene. It should make for an interesting piece. :D

I've had some initial ideas so far, and for the most part I'm settled on an idea. I haven't got a concept piece I'm necessarily working from this time round, but I have an initial image I took myself for my first thoughts on composition. Space as a commodity/rarity is something I feel plays a major part in Cyberpunk and as such this is something I'm going to be trying to push with the scene. The central theme is a railside market, but for the railside part I'm looking at using the London Over/Underground as reference & leaning into the idea of sleazy sci-fi the market will be a smash up between body mod shops, and red light district style fronts.

Initial areas of inspiration include:

• London Rail
• Maeklong Railway Market
• Industrial motifs (excessive piping, metal floored leveling)
• Red Light Districts

Some backstory to the idea and information I can use to flesh out the scene:

"The Earth is at capacity. Large colonising ships have been constructed to take humankind to the stars, however this luxury can only be afforded by the mega rich and those lucky enough to get on through a lottery pool. The last ship left years ago, and it appears as if production has stopped since then on colony class ships. With several factions realising that leaving Earth is no longer an option they've resorted to territory wars over the remaining land. Older organisations have turned to extreme methods to correct Earth's trajectory. With the tipping point well in the past groups like the Extinction Rebellion have splintered into groups with different ideals on the best way to right a dying Earths course. Extinction Now believe the only path is to thin the masses, and as such violent attacks on mega-structures have become a regular occurrence. Modification Rebellion believe that the future of humanity lies in extreme body modification and adjustments. A wave of kidnappings are believed to be M.R hoarding guinea pigs for extreme modification experiments. Some smaller groups still tie themselves to the old ways and have tried to separate themselves from the mega-cities in an attempt to return to the ways of old with varying levels of success. There are of course those that still try to police the city, although their methods are more extreme than those of their predecessors they go by the classic title 'The Met'. Greater London is a city in constant flux, consumed by faction war and rife with crime."

I'm looking at maybe seeing if I can get some character models to try and play with this story in the concept piece but we shall see! :D

Next up I'm looking at getting a rough concept sorted over the next couple days, followed/alongside a basic grey box blockout and asset list to move forward with :) Good luck everyone!

Took a bit of a mental break after the last scene and now back into it! After going through my portfolio and having a look at what I'm currently missing, and what I want to look at cutting I've decided the classic 'Sci-fi' modular build environment is what I need to have added! So that's what I'll be working on from here on out. I'm hoping to drop a weekly (where possible) update on the blog at the end of each week detailing the work I have done for this piece.

Planning and Research

I've collected a few tutorials and videos to watch through and try and absorb/cement some knowledge with. I want to have a solid hard surface environment piece that demonstrates understanding for Trim sheets, tiling textures, and decal work in environment creation. On top of this the Proto-molecule information should provide me with an opportunity to work in some practice with organic shapes as well.

There are already a few tiling areas and trim sheet pieces I can already start to pick out in these sections. As I'm creating the blockout I'll be adding to a trim/tiling breakdown sheet and planning out my course of action for them. I'm hoping with how clean geometry wise a lot of the surfaces are I should be able to get away with a couple trim sheets and a nice set of tiling textures. Ensuring these have an effective texel density across them will be important. With the size of the scene I will be aiming for a first person setup with the Texel density of 10,24px/cm (1024=1m).

The initial focus will be on getting a blockout of the scene setup and getting the base ship to point of being done. Then I am planning on hammering in hard with the Proto-Molecule organics and combat decals to push the final scene setup. Once I've got a cleaner scene to a decent point I will probably experiment with finding a presentation angle further and doing a quick paintover to see where I could add the Proto-molecule information and damage. Hopefully by the end of this I should have a nice clean version of the bridge, and a battle torn version of the bridge that has fallen to the Proto-molecule.

This project is on hold currently, but planning on coming back to after things aren't so busy! 🤞

Whoops! A bit of a hiatus there with going on holiday and what not! Back to the grindstone however and I've got the broken wood and rocks in the scene. I may need to brighten up the wood and look at lowering the rocks so they aren't so prominent. As well as adding these parts I have also made a few extra changes since last time:

• Altered lighting to be closer to the original concept
• Raised the rear camp slightly so that the tents sat higher and more prominently in the scene
• Tweaks to the terrain materials to try and blend them further, and avoid too many open repeating areas

I'm relatively happy with the main shot now (bar a few decals scattered around for grunge, etc) so the next focus is making sure the campsites have more going on and look lived in. As it stands the tents are relatively empty and the space between them is emptier. I have a few assets I could use already to help develop these spaces further. This is currently what the rear camp looks like:

I've started playing with the rocks and a higher res texture to create a sort of fire pit. I'm hoping I should be able to create this with assets I already have and some decals, but I may need to make some metal parts using the trim sheets I have. Other assets that I can use to flesh the scene out already are:

• Benches
• Barrels
• Lance Holders
• Wood Pieces

The plan is to create some extra pieces over the weekend using a combination of the wood kit, trim sheets and a couple of unique pieces. These will also help add some further information to the seating areas of the arena as well. 

Assets using existing kit:

• Table
• Water trough
• Barrel Holder
• Fire Pit metal
• Holdall

Assets that need creating:

• Pillows*
• Rugs*
• Garlands*
• Tankard
• Bucket
• Various Decals

*These will use a fabric trimsheet to create variations quickly.

The aim to just kinda crack through as much of that list over the weekend and then I'll update here with the progress Sunday evening! Final push over the next week!

Managed to push the scene over the last day and a half to fix the issues I previously presented. Value across the main shot sits much nicer now and directs the eye in the right direction.

Alterations and Additions:

• Grass, Ivy and Trees have had their textures adjusted to better fit within the scene. For the most part this meant increasing value lightness of textures and tweaking some saturation levels.
• Tree canopy has been altered. Whilst I was tweaking the textures I figured I'd play with the tops of the trees, removing some of the large clusters and adding some smaller branches so that the top of the trees sat more naturally. I also added some more variation in the height of the trees to a more extreme degree. This means that some trees are now more visible and it also helps to direct the curve of the tree tops from the top right corner into the tower.
• Ground textures for the most part have been overhauled. I wasn't too happy with the textures I used as they were too uniform across them and too noisy. I built them again in Designer adding some grass tufts in. I may return and add some small twigs as well, but for now I am quite happy with how these now look. Another fix on the new Prints mud was the addition of mud being displaced around the prints to better replicate reference.
• Finally a lot of the cloth colour values have been ever so slightly tweaked. Reducing the intensity of some colours and ensuring contrast in a couple of the other designs.

Progress Shot:

Close up of new ground textures in action:

Value Comparison GIF:

The next part of the scene I will be looking at over the next couple days is pushing the jousting area a bit more with a few extra assets. In the concept there is some wood debris dotted around so that is my first point of call. Whilst I'm building parts for the wood debris I'll also be looking at adding in some small rocks in the scene to add a bit more depth to the ares that are using the rock textures. These along with the Petals should make that space a bit more interesting. I'm planning on utilising the foliage system to drop these into the scene.

Forthcoming Assets:

• Wood Debris Foliage
• Rocks Foliage
• Larger Scene rocks (To add further depth around the wooded areas of the map)

I'm away this weekend so I'll either drop a progress post Friday before I leave in the evening on Sunday/Monday!

As always Feedback is welcome :D

As I previously mentioned on the challenge thread there is still a chunk of things I'm planning to add to the scene to improve it further before I add it to my portfolio. Below is the scene as it currently stands:

I'll be documenting on here when I make additions to the project over the next few weeks with the hopes of having it portfolio ready by the end of August. I want to focus on pushing the value ranges in the scene first before I add the other parts. One thing that the concept does is push lighter values in the sky and in the ground to highlight the seating and tower as the main focus of the image. My current values in the image need some tweaks to push this more in my final composition.

Areas of note:

• Dark values on drapes and large flags need lightening (Flag needs to be lighter than the corbels and the stripes on the drapes need to be a similar value to the blue)
• Ground needs a lighter value range. I'm planning on revisiting the textures for the ground to add more variation as well so I will consider value further when editing the materials.
• Trees are quite dark overall at the moment and need a lighter value across them (Tweaking the leaf textures should help as well as adding some elevation behind the initial row of trees so that trees further back are affected by the fog in the scene.)
• Sandstone may also benefit from being lighter in value to further highlight this area in the composition.

As a further note I'm going to focus more on a cinematic shot like the one above as well as the original concept angle. I've so far: altered the lighting setup, added a slight world aligned variation to the seating materials albedo and roughness, and altered some of the colour values on the canopies.

Looking forward to really nailing this scene down so it's portfolio ready! Any feedback is always welcome! 😁