A Writer's journey into game development

 

Good news! And bad news.Project is coming up nicely, with a small private demo released to some friends. Got great insight from it, and even fixed some issues. Big problem is that some other issues depend on a full team, or at least, on some artists working regularly.  The game requires a total rework of the art. That's inevitable. We took some bad decisions to speed up work that has proven to be a burden in advanced stages. For example: using MakeHuman to generate characters. Per se, it is not that bad, if you take some time to retouch the result. Also, animators hate MH's rig. Don't use it. I had an excellent animator, and the game anims are bad. Not totally his fault, he had to work with a subpar rig that limited what he could do.  Also, another advice. Godot really sucks with kitbashes. Now we have a nice kitbash that allows me to create all sort of fancy buildings, even with interiors, but the game suffered a severe perfomance penalty. Godot can't properly instance...

 O3DE is no longer the newcomer. From "why do we need another engine if we have Unreal, Unity and Godot?" we went to "Maybe I should consider this as a valid candidate". Version 24.09 offers a certain level of maturity, enough to make it worth the risk of trying it. In fact, there are people already working in serious projects, like Carbonated Inc. which is using it for a multiplayer mobile game. So, I am spending more time with O3DE. It is something completely different and requires more effort than other engines, specially because I have other projects to take care, and also because I have to learn Unreal at same time (it is one of my jobs now). But, despite lack of documentation and tutorials, I have advanced a bit, mostly thanks to the help of the community. Lets see what can I do with it in the future.  

 

 Well, considering most of the team is working only a few hours every week, we are not too behind schedule, but I don't foresee we can release a demo for november. Some time has been spent trying to find a workflow that help an small and unexperienced team to produce a sizeable amount of complex assets. We are still experimenting, but a few things are already in place. Ok, lets see what have we done.  After several tests, we have defined player models structure. We are using a body separated in six parts: head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. To save time, the character is generated via MakeHuman. The pro is that you get a complete and anatomically correct model in minutes. The cons, you have to work a bit to lower the poly count, because MakeHuman offers a high poly model and a very low poly one that looks ugly. Also, all the models looks pretty much the same (you will notice that in the character creation scene), but as we use an isometric camera, during gameplay the raci...

 A bit late, but here is it!