Almost out of the brainstorming stage. I had been overthinking my idea over the past week and I remembered I'm not making a game, and that I really want to focus on just a few things: developing a customized painterly style, developing a system to dynamically and seamlessly transition between two distinctly different dream environments, and using Blueprints to procedurally generate these environments as you explore. I'm not really concerned what the structure is, as long as I can successfully achieve these goals and showcase how I came to that visual output in a tech demo style playthrough.
I originally had been thinking of creating a house, but that started to feel constricting, too based in the development of the characterization of who lived there, and not true to the kinds of freeform spaces I wanted to design.
Instead, I'm going to be creating two surreal landscapes. All sorts of unexpected surprises can be scattered across landscapes as you explore-- a house, a partial house, manmade objects -- this better reflects the disorganized nature of our dreams.
This week I found a cinematic done for the game Ryse: Son of Rome, and it really inspired me to focus on achieving a painted style in real-time 3D. This cinematic is pre-rendered, but some of the techniques to add a brush stroke quality could apply. Here are some stills, concept art, and a break down of how it was made.
I originally had been thinking of creating a house, but that started to feel constricting, too based in the development of the characterization of who lived there, and not true to the kinds of freeform spaces I wanted to design.
Instead, I'm going to be creating two surreal landscapes. All sorts of unexpected surprises can be scattered across landscapes as you explore-- a house, a partial house, manmade objects -- this better reflects the disorganized nature of our dreams.
This week I found a cinematic done for the game Ryse: Son of Rome, and it really inspired me to focus on achieving a painted style in real-time 3D. This cinematic is pre-rendered, but some of the techniques to add a brush stroke quality could apply. Here are some stills, concept art, and a break down of how it was made.
Since I often spend too much time painting one thing and realize a few hours later I've turned up with something I didn't even feel passionate about, I forced myself into doing some very quick speed painting exercises to more quickly explore different solutions for the type of mood, color palette, and environment I might want to create.
I'm starting to like the idea of one environment being more warm, inviting, sunny, and foliage based, while the other would have more rock formations, sand, a cooler color palette, and feel more foreboding.
I also did a quick painting to illustrate the transition between two dream spaces at their border.
This week, I successfully got the multiple cross section canvas system working, so now it matches your hit to the nearest Z height and writes to the corresponding texture. The next step is to get it set up so that I can interpolate between these textures to be able to unmask fake "volumes" in shaders. I might edit this and add pictures of this working in the near future.
I've also been doing a lot of testing to develop this painted style, with broken up painted edges and the correct amount of material definition -- no results yet, but this next week I should be moving into more production, less pre-production. Now that I have developed more of a direction in terms of what I'll be creating and my pitch video is complete, I'm excited to start developing my first proof of concepts for my systems and assets.
I've also been doing a lot of testing to develop this painted style, with broken up painted edges and the correct amount of material definition -- no results yet, but this next week I should be moving into more production, less pre-production. Now that I have developed more of a direction in terms of what I'll be creating and my pitch video is complete, I'm excited to start developing my first proof of concepts for my systems and assets.
Pitch video - planning, script, rehearsing, recording, and editing: 6 hours
Painting, sketching, brainstorming: 8 hours
Blogging/blog response: 1 hour
Testing style and shader development, world canvas system: 6 hours
Painting, sketching, brainstorming: 8 hours
Blogging/blog response: 1 hour
Testing style and shader development, world canvas system: 6 hours