BGP Week 4: Sticks and Stones

I became ill this week, went to a few doctor’s appointments, prepared for the “public discussion” of our reports, and participated in the pre-alpha testing, so I did not get as much time on the project as I should have needed. During the short time that I managed to spend on the project, I made a  couple of textures for props and environment. We needed to get some more textures, or at least colors into the geame world, so we could see how the color choices turned out in-game, and what needed to be iterated upon.

We did some quick test textures, and slapped onto the rock walls, the result was far worse than we had hoped for. We had decided to use a limited number of “basic stone” textures, that could be applied to any rock. This would spare us a lot of textures, since there are a lot of similar looking stones in the game. Consequently, the shapes of the stones would not match the  textures. The result of the texture not matching the shapes looked incredibly awkward at some places, and we feared we would not be able put any more detail than some color variation into the stone textures, to be able to make it look okay.

At this point we had only used diffuse textures, and we discussed if the result would be good enough if we used normal maps to get some details in the stone. We did some more tests, with tiled normal maps, and the result was an improvement. One of our artists suggested using a single diffuse, with a variety of different maps randomized across all stones, using a single material. We made progress, but we will have to put some more thought into this before we have the appealing graphics that we want.

Overall, I fear we might be falling behind schedule. We did not have much to show at the pre-alpha, far from what we have planned for the final product. Barley any textures are done, and there are still animations left to do. Along with the report, there are a lot of things to do, and not too much time. Hopefully, we will pull this together and have a playable (and good looking) demo at the end.