Continuing Week 5-6 Part 3: New Town (Patreon)
Content
The next thing I took care of for the town was making materials for the remaining house props. This includes the balcony, doors, and windows:
I started by building a concrete base for the frames of these props:
As for the doors and windows, I wanted to make sure that they vary in color. That way they aren't painted the same and the town doesn't look copy pasted. Therefore I painted the door and window materials white so I can afterwards multiply it by any color in a shader. This is a very cheap and easy trick to ensure I don't make textures for every possible color of door (could be dozens).
The cool thing about using Substance Painter is that everything is procedural. This dramatically reduces the work needed to paint models because the work you do for 1 model can be applied to other models instantly in a drag and drop fashion.
This is why Substance Painter is my 2nd favorite program in the whole world, because it abandons the old fashioned way of making game textures via photoshop in favor of a much more robust and fast alternative. I also built a typical rock texture that is seen very often in Mexico:
The results are pretty good so far and very cheap in performance.
Overall it's starting to piece together.
I made sure to make some buildings look different than the rest to give good looking variation to the town. The building bellow will be an ice cream shop.
Pretty much all materials have been finished and actual game related work can now start. This includes making LOD models for some props to reduce the overall poly count in the screen, making physics hulls to interact with each model, and ensuring everything is performant. I've already started on a related subject which involves the sound of the town. Calpico has made dozens of new ambient sounds to make the town feel like there is activity in the town. There are random roosters, horses, dogs, and misc sounds that will randomly play every so often to make the town feel lively. This prompted a rewrite to the sound and ambience system of the game. It is now much more robust, optimized, and will allow for the aforementioned random variety in different zones of the map.
I plan to record a YouTube video in the next 2 days to showcase the upcoming features of v0.75 which is now really close. No hard date yet (until the YouTube video) but I'm guessing it will release in about 2~3 weeks. Beta for supporters will be in about 1 week.
Stay tuned!