Week 1 – Big Game Project Catch-up
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It is that time of the year again. It is time to develop a game, a vertical slice for Gotland Game Conference where me and my great team will exhibit a game concept we have had in the making for quite a while now. And this mysterious game for the time being is called F.R.A.U.S. This post is the first of many to come, and the purpose with this one is to catch up with what I have been doing in the pre-production stages. The first of my tests was to implement the Ultimate Trim Technique that is covered in great detail in a GDC presentation available here – http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022324/The-Ultimate-Trim-Texturing-Techniques Sadly after a day of rigorous testing and experimentation I could not implement it in the fashion I wanted to, my goal was to make a user-friendly tool so that the environment artist involved, would have had an easy time to prepare his assets for the technique. The benefits from the technique are obvious, better in-game performance and easy to keep the visuals of the assets consistent as it would take only a few texture maps to texture all the assets for the game. My next step is to take a look at introducing smart procedural textures with the help of Houdini. Secondly, I have begun creating a “Level Builder” so the level designer could easily iterate and design an actual level within the game engine itself, which in this particular instance is Unity 5. I used Houdini and Houdini Engine to achieve building this tool. What Houdini essentially is is a feature complete 3D-package where everything is node-based, basically visual scripting. Houdini Engine is what allows the power of Houdinis procedurality to be within game engines and other packages as well. My next post will most likely be covering the beginnings of the characters for the game. My roles in the development of F.R.A.U.S will mainly be as a lead artist but due to the nature of us being a very small team, I will most likely hop around everywhere to help wherever I can.
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