Very small limited RPG (sort of) style adventure

I am building a small game to teach myself BGE and game development in general. So this would be my first “serious” project :). I got inspired by an Android game I played a while back, it’s called “Hoplite”. I thought it’s quite entertaining (at least for a mobile platform) so I want to see if I am able to create something reasonable based on that.

Here is the first week progress:

I don’t plan on updating it regularly, because quite frankly I have a lot to learn and some weeks I’ll spend playing with Blender (and game dev.), and just a bit of that I’m going to actually create something for the game.

Wish me luck!

Wow, im new as well, but i really have no idea how that is done great stuff. Keep going i might learn from this :slight_smile:

Thanks. If I do enough progress with this and it ends up the way I like, I’ll convert this process into a tutorial for all of us to have as a reference.

Cool, best of luck with the progress :slight_smile:

OK, try not to laugh too hard… but this is the concept art I made for the hero of the game and his armor:


The 3D modeling is going to be based on it. I saw some tutorials online for doing textures for games and I thought I want to give it a go, have everything done by hand… I’m crazy that way (if you’re really wondering, it’s supposed to be for practice :d).

So I’m going for some sort of spartan hero figure type of character. I’m still wrestling my brain about the enemies. I’d like to go for some underworld creatures but I don’t think I have enough experience (painting) to come up with good art :/. I’ll search online for some tutorials. Wish me luck…

edit:
I had just realized that the ‘shorts’ part of the armor is supposed to be different… well, that’s what I get for not looking at references… oh well, back to the drawing board. I also need to add some armor on his arms… tomorrow I’ll take a look at references and make appropriate changes.

edit2:
Did a quick job of changing some things, nothing too massive, but I think it helps a bit.


And this is what I came up for the creature thing. This would be the first creature type. And at this point I have enough to start building the main character and his first enemy. This, then, will be my next step.


The second creature is most likely going to be based on this one because I want to reuse as much as possible what I do. I’m still debating if I should add some armor to it or not (maybe just a skirt). I know these things could be better, but I hope once I start 3D modeling I’ll have more success there.

The reason I’m going through all of this trouble even for what I hope to be a simple game is that I’m a strong believer that you need to have nice effects for your games, otherwise you’re missing that extra bit that could make the game stand out. I don’t know if there are fans of UFOAI around here. Maybe they have to say something about the following. I played UFOAI and it’s nice for an open source game, but it cannot compare with XCOM Enemy Within for example, we’re talking about different leagues here. And why is that? My strong belief is that most of it actually has to do with the art. The simple truth is UFOAI just lack that extra bit that could turn it into a cool game. It has all the mechanics, but… everything else seems very static, inorganic which is a shame really.

Going back… hope you like my ‘art’ so far. I know it has issues but hey… I’m trying at least :).

Dude, you need to give yourself more credit than you have. This is actually really nice, and a lot of Blender veterans can’t even get to something this good.

Thanks MichelleSea, really appreciate it. I guess I feel like I could do a lot better… you see, when I look at my creations I spot all the flaws in them which isn’t a particularly motivating feeling. But I’m known to be stubborn so that will have to get me by :).

edit:

Also guys, please do comment on the content and let me know what you think. Thanks.

OK, so meet our 3D hero guy (don’t have a name yet):




This is the high resolution version from which I’m going to bake the normal map… hopefully with success. This little dude right here just took me 6 hours of figuring out the sculpting system so hope you approve, cause I don’t think I have the nerves to do it all over again. His face doesn’t really look like in the drawing, or better yet, not like I want it, but I can’t seem to find my workflow with the sculpting system (for now)…

On the other hand, the creature… can’t wait to start sculpting that thing.

So the plan is like this:

  1. build hi-res creature
  2. retopology for hero guy and creature
  3. uv for both models

You really got talent!
Most of the people here in the Game section can’t show such good work in modeling and sculpting!

Thank you, it really means a lot especially for my motivation!

The reason I’m going through all of this trouble is two-fold: I want to have high quality content for the game which I think will improve it a lot, even though it’s going to be really simple in the end. And second I want to go through the entire game development process for my own benefit… before starting this project I had absolutely no idea how difficult and rewarding this can be. Wish me luck :smiley: cause I plan on going the whole 10 yards (or is it miles?!).

Looks great, aren’t his hips a little small though? Maybe the whole trunk of the body could be enlarged a bit…

Don’t ask me though, sculpting is not my specialty :slight_smile:

Yeah, I know, it’s not perfect and I’m not really aiming for perfect right now… this is my first sculpt in any way so… and don’t even want to think about the monster creature thing :)). Ah! But I’ll have fun with that for sure.

Now, this guy here is gonna have armor anyway so I’m not worrying too much about all these little details. The one I’m not really happy with is the face, but oh well… I’ll learn some day (or maybe just throw some helmet on him, that will fix it ha!).

Don’t worry, I was just kidding, I’m terrible at sculpting and my knowledge of anatomy is pretty poor. But I do have some experience with modeling low poly characters for the BGE so I may be able to share some advice if you’d like.

For some practical advice, it’s best to bend the arms and legs a little,
make each one like this >
or at least like this )
instead of like this |

The reason is when you add an armature and rig him up, you’ll want to use inverse kinematics for animation. If the leg/arm is straight like that, the IK doesn’t know which way the knee/elbow bends, it can’t guess. If it’s bent a little naturally, the IK will tend to follow the natural bend, you won’t have to add an IK guide object. It also assists with avoiding mesh compression of joints such as the wrist and elbow when bending the mesh. If your model suffers from mesh compression, the joints will appear much thinner than the rest of the limb when bent. Modeling the joints already bent makes this problem less noticeable.

The ideal pose for animation is kind of hunched over as if riding an invisible motor cycle, but that’s not the best for avoiding stretching textures, so if you can find a pose halfway between straight and hunched it should do well for both animation and textures.

I’d suggest trying to rig before getting too far in to texturing because the process of rigging and animating often throws up problems with the mesh or with textures.

I usually:
model,
rig,
test animate (walk cycle, default pose)
texture,
fully animate

other people follow different work flows though, so it’s best to experiment to find the best for you. You’ll notice I didn’t include building a highpoly model or baking in my work flow, that’s because I’ve never done it. Maybe it could just be included in the modeling stage, so that you make both the high poly and low poly, and then rig up the low poly for testing and then go back and edit the high poly one once you know what you need to change.

Thanks, appreciate the advice, I’ll definitely do as you say, I actually would normally do the modeling as you say, but because I’m quite terrible at proportions when drawing, it was just easier to do it that way :). But I’ll definitely give him a slightly different arm bend when doing the low poly version.

Welcome back to a tiny bit of progress for this untitled BGE project game thing. So without further ado I present to you our hero’s nemesis, the demon, henceforth known as Bob the Fat Demon:




And with this update comes great achievement because now we have the ingredients to create our interactive “high quality” models (if I can figure out how this retopology thing works…). It feels like Christmas (almost :D).

And a close-up for the ladies (he’s feeling mighty photogenic today):


I proudly present to you the (almost) perfect version of our hero guy dude:



One more little step towards interaction.

edit:
This guy here has 2540 faces. I have no idea if this is good or not, but we’ll find out (soon I hope) :).

Attachments


Meet Bob’s brother, known as “Bob the Low Poly Fat Demon”:



Now, as Smoking_mirror advised (thanks by the way), I’m going to proceed with rigging and animating before UV unwrapping… since I do plan to do these things by hand and I don’t want to do it for nothing :). So hopefully, next time you’ll see Bob here dancing all around, or maybe just do what demons do… we’ll see.

edit:

This guy took me considerable less time and I think he also looks better than the human (Bob: “Ahahha puny human! You ugly, me beautiful!”). The hand for example took me about 30 min with this one whereas for the hero dude it was about 1:20 :)) but it was more or less trial and error with that one. Bob here has 2176 faces (without the horns and teeth).

I will probably want to add tongue and the lot to Bob because I’m thinking he might want to scream some demon stuff when humans drop by. But this for later.

Attachments


So I’ve been “away” working on my new and only interwebs site (which you can now safely find in my signature: yay!). I’ll be jumping back again to Blender in no time :). Next up on the list: rigging.