Sunday, February 26, 2012

Textures and more textures

Had some downtime late this evening and completed my search for textures. At first, I was of the opinion of hiring an artist to make a bunch of textures that I would need. What kind? Run down metal, wood, concrete and other surfaces that be good for a post-apocalyptic setting.

Then I talked to another indie developer, one that actually has games published and makes a living doing so. He said he never makes his own textures or rarely buys them, there are a ton of free texture websites out there.

Ok, so I went to searching around and I found the mecca of texture sites. It's a page with a bunch of links to texture websites. Some links are broken, some websites no longer exist, etc. I went through them one by one and found a good dozen sites with lots of free, detailed textures to use. http://freetexturesite.blogspot.com/ is the site.

I now have close to 20 bookmarks of sites that have various textures, lots of them, thousands of them. So it stands to reason why should I spend hundreds or more dollars on textures when there are so many available. Since I'm a artist newb, I found a tutorial on using Gimp to making textures seamless. I can see spending a day hunting through these websites and having a lot of high quality, usable textures that will be perfect for a RPG. Good stuff!

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Game Editor

I discovered early on that if you want to make a game you need a good game editor. I suppose you could code the world by hand but I see that as very tedious and time consuming. I coded a world editor that has all the things I think I'll need to visually build a post-apocalyptic work. Here is a screenshot of it.


Ok so first off, I know the grid is off and it needs to be adjusted. I just coded this a few days ago and it's not finished. The red buttons are navigation buttons to move in any direction around the map. The bottom pan are all of the properties I have for any given object. The left are the source graphics, I just select one and place it on the map. There is also the ability to group the source graphics into categories to keep everything organized.

There is more to it than that but that's the gist of it. It still needs work. For example, if I have a graphic in a level and I delete that graphic from the library the editor freezes on startup. There are other things on my list that I need to check or debug.

I am somewhat proud of my editor though :) If something isn't working, I know exactly where to go to fix it. If I need a new feature added, I can added pretty quickly and easily. The point is this is my editor and it's tailored for my use.

I decided I needed to invest a decent amount of time into making a solid, stable editor. Before it was a half ass editor, and I didn't get very far in coding my game before I discovered the editor lacked something, or crashed, or whatever. Once I'm done with the editor, it's stable, does everything I need it to do than I know I have a stable base to build upon. Hopefully I'll have the editor done in a few days than off to other, more fun things to do.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

3D Modeling tools to create isometric artwork

This has been a source of great frustration for me, what is the right method and tools to create isometric artwork for the RPG's I will hopefully some day create? It's a subject I keep coming back to over and over again.

What is the right tool for me? The perfect tool for someone else might be a terrible tool for me so here is a run down of things I looked at and my comments about them.

Blender - A good, solid solution to make isometric graphics. You can save camera angles, it has a large community, I've never heard anything bad about Blender. The only issue I had, and I heard this repeated a few times, Blender isn't the easiest 3D modeller to learn.

World Creator 2.5 - It's kind of obscure and the community is very small. It's been my limited experience that the creators are very passionate and very attentive to the user needs. This is a viable option for a non-artist a good way to create old school looking graphics. The drawbacks is the software, as far as I can tell, rarely gets updated and the community is very small. While in some respects it's a time saver to use it to create isometric graphics, from my limited knowledge, you have to hand edit (pixel by pixel) png files to create objects so in the long run it might be very time consuming.

Hexagon by Daz3D - I didn't do a lot of research into it but it doesn't appear to be a good tool for isometric art. I posted a few threads and it doesn't have much support in the way for isometric rendering.

Sketchup - Somewhat simple to use with not a lot of confusing options for someone not so smart such as myself. I explored this a while back and got some really screwed up isometric walls that didn't match and instantly dismissed it. Dumb on my part because I should have investigated it some more and posted on some forums. I discovered that with the isometric view you have to change the camera option. As a recent experiment, I created a couple of simple walls and they matched perfectly when placed side by side.

So I think I'm going to use Sketchup to create the graphics for my RPG. It has some built in isometric support, it doesn't have a mind numbing amount of options like Blender and it's free. For a while I was heavily leaning towards World Creator 2.5 but Sketchup offers one thing that WC doesn't - The ability to create a variety of objects quickly. With it I can create furniture, computers, doors, windows, rubble, sidewalks and any object I can imagine with a minimal time investment. Sure, I might be eating these words in a few months but we'll see! Also, a recent problem I ran into, the angle of some test walls and floors I created didn't match up. It was probably an error somewhere on my part but it bothered me.

I hope to create a isometric grid where one graphic fits snugly into one tile for AStar navigation purposes. When I created a test wall and floor with Sketchup the angles were a perfect match so it's alot easier to create a grid around that. This has been a pain in my gut for sometime now. It was either create the art mostly myself or outsource it, but let's face it, for some old school graphics why pay good money to have someone else make it?

Next up, the importance of starting game development with a good editor.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Game Documentation

So this is my first blog on my new game, Dystopian Dawn. What is Dystopian Dawn about? It's a post-apocalyptic RPG set about 10 years or so from present day. Most of the human race has been destroyed, and no it's not by nuclear weapons but I'm not going to say by what yet. Dystopian Dawn (that may not be the final name) is in 2D and party based tactical combat, yes we're talking old school here.

So to begin with I have virtually the entire game documented, in google spreadsheets. All of the PC traits, levels, missions, etc are all written up. What's left, and I admit it's a significant portion, is to write up two factions I have in mind for the overall plot, and game will have multiple endings.

Today I spent a lot of time tweaking the level editor. I already had a working level editor from a while ago but it needed a lot of polish. I still have some bugs to hunt down and some features to add but it's a little more robust not. Once I get the editor completed I'll feel like I have a more stable foundation to build the game.

Once the editor is completed, working and tested, I will go to work on the actual game. Where to being? I have about a 300 point to do list on all of the in game screens, that might be a good start.