LONG POST (about game) (don't get excited) (Patreon)

I had a spontaneous urge to try making something in Unreal engine again, and decided to work on this while waiting for fluids and such to simulate. Originally, this concept was something I was working on awhile ago in Unreal for school (my last semester I got to pick an elective and did an intro to game design class). The project had a lot of freedom to it and it could be pretty much anything as long as you fulfilled some basic milestones each week.

It's not very interesting, but here's the title screen I did for it:

https://twitter.com/velocirection/status/1442761764991602688?s=20&t=Cy8_Wz-MDZ-CKGaFhrnvdA

(This version is even less coherent than what I'm posting about here, you're not missing much)

I re-examined the idea of it all and the aesthetic I'd like to go for, what kind of gameplay, and still a lot of questions remain un-answered, but I'm closer to a visual style I'd like to go for at least.

The original model for Gyra, this lil' dragon dude, was pretty high poly since I intended to use it for some 3d animations as well (which will happen eventually, probably).

This is almost 17,000 triangles! Not unusual for games today.

But it's a lot more complicated to model and rig this kind of character, and do this level of detail for each character in a hypothetical game, as opposed to something more lower spec like a sixth generation console game.

The model above was the original Gyra model, and I went through and tried to lower the poly count down to something that would be more fitting of the ps2/gamecube/xbox era of games. This didn't work too well... a lot of the problems with this design aren't just with the polycount, but the visual design. It works well enough for 3d animation, but the shapes and proportions don't read well at a lower resolution and with a videogame-y camera. I drew over him a bit, then quickly felt like I had a clear enough idea to start from scratch on something better.

This is the initial model with only vertex colors. This is around 4500 triangles, perfectly reasonable for a late generation game for the sixth generation of consoles.

This is substantially better! The body shapes, the eyes and face are much nicer and more readable. Also attempted to texture him.

And also wanted to see what some outlines would look on him (like Sly Cooper). It's all quite promising!

I also experimented with some environment asset creation methods. I took a random image from google of a computer monitor, then made and unwrapped a simple mesh and placed the UVs where they would make sense.

Add some vertex painted ambient occlusion and baked it the texture:

And also I gave the mesh a little deformation cage to mess with the shape in a non-destructive way.

It's quite easy to get some expressive, stylistic shapes this way!

Another thing I did was rig and test some facial bones. The nice thing about low polygon models is that, since there's way fewer polygons to deal with, you can more easily rig and control them very precisely, allowing for some nice, pointy expressive shapes.

I feel like I can get a ton of range thanks to how well the limitations of low poly modeling work with bold, pointy shapes.

I also did some test animations:

Designed, modeled, rigged and animated a basic enemy:

Also started blocking out a first level type place:

Thought about ideas for some other levels

Potential first boss thing

But will this actually turn into something? Maybe, maybe not. I've already started to run into some roadblocks (like, how to program this, what kind of gameplay) and I started getting way too obsessed with it. I've always done this with game development >_> if I can't solve a problem or if I want to try doing something, it just keeps me up at night, and I end up not sleeping much and being cranky about game making problems until I can get it to work.

Then, I'll reach a point where it seems like there's so much to research, program, test, debug, just to make something simple, it's demotivating.

As much fun as this is, I just like animation so much more because there's way less problems I can get stuck on and obsess to an unhealthy degree over. But I figured I should share this with everyone since it's been kind of cutting into the progress on the glamor hole animation I could be making. Though this is about all I'll do for now, probably. I've lost most of my steam on this silly Spyro-like.