A Writer's journey into game development

Alejandro sent me yesterday some screenshots of the assets used in the first project scene. As usual, I had an image in my mind, mostly influenced by the previous art I used (which was totally out of my control). The new models and textures suit much better the essence of Calesoni Castle. Calesoni is a place in the middle of nowhere, but their inhabitants think it is a beacon of civilization in a neighborhood of farmer villages, just because they have stone houses. Actually, they dont have even a decent brothel. Yet, it is a medium sized location, designed to introduce the player to the game mechanics, specially combat. You will be fighting a few minutes (unless you take your time to explore the place) after arriving, but later will have access to many different quests, involving a wide range of skills. Obviously, you wont be able to complete all of them.

Unigine Engine had some glory moment a few years ago, when was often in Phoronix news, because of being the only one game engine supporting Linux (natively!). But their elitist and closed approach made them lost the big opportunity, IMHO, when the community demanded Linux port of Wasteland 2. The problem with Unigine is mostly its lack of documentation. Instead of making the engine widely accessible, they refuse to provide what they call "evaluation kit" if you are not an established game company, 90% of which are not going to need an evaluation kit, because they already have an engine. The license costs are around $30k per project, the forums are closed, and they havent worked too hard to fill Youtube with videotutorials showing how easy is to work with it (it is not too easy, I used it once in 2011). They didnt changed their licensing when Unreal released UDK, and guess what, didnt changed it when full Unreal Engine became free, as did Unity3D. With the great opportunit...

This is just a test model! Final art is going to be different.

A concept artist and musician has officially joined the project. We still have lot of work to do before using his second skill, but Im sure that will come some day too. Have been quite busy lately, mostly doing research, or working out. Dont expect too many updates, time is not enough to post more than a few lines. But probably we will have screenshots of the actual game next week, so, stay tuned. We really could use another developer, with Unity experience, but I dont expect to get one so easy.

Today I have uploaded the project to github . We are going to use Unity3D 5, which is kinda weird choice for an open source game. Why do we took this decision? And I say we because the team also took part in the process. When I started (or restarted the project), I wanted to use a complete game engine. After 4 years of developing with Ogre, I was totally sure that I had broke with rendering engines. The obvious choices, in the end of 2014, were Urho3D and Godot, I already had discarded Torque3D. Urho3D seemed good after a few weeks of testing. It had an editor, not integrated into the game, but quite good. Development was active, renderer, even when based on Dx 9/OpenGL 2.1, was good. It lacked important stuff, like terrain editor, but I was sure that it would come at some point. But a couple of months later, well into the development process, I noticed that Urho lacked some sort of integration. A few things didnt work so tight as I expected. It was time to look at Godot. But t...

After a long wait, I received a quite large pack of usable art from Alejandro. Now the project has a considerable amount of weapons and armors, the houses for the first scene, a few props and two basic characters with all the animations you can imagine (exactly, 30 animations). Here are a couple of screenshots of the houses inside Unity3D.  The quality is not the best, because building the map has stressed my patience to its limits. Problems with the mouse, insufficient RAM, no video card. Name a limitation, and I have it. But the good news are that the project first sponsor confirmed that he will donate a video card soon, lets hope the postal system works and it can arrive in one piece. Two houses. A fountain. The following renders are created from Blender, and show some of the weapons: Im going to upload all the models to OpenGameArt as soon as I convert all of them to Blender format and set the texture paths to relative. All of them have the diffuse text...