XENOCIDAIRE (Patreon)

It's another week (though I think I've had this thing for less than 7 days), and I'm excited to share some stuff with you guys again. I cannot believe how many of you there are and how generous you guys are being. Thank you so much. 

Blender is something I started playing with at the beginning of August and I have been pleasantly surprised at the results I've been able to get from a beginner's skill level. 

Mangling a model with modifiers. 

Godot, on the other hand, is not coming easy to me. My attempts to read documentation and books have gone miserably slow, so I've purchased a course by Miziziziz  on making a simple, retro style FPS. Miziziziz's "Wrought Flesh" project is something I'm super excited to play, so trying his course seemed like a safe investment. 

The course is six hours long, straightforward, and moves at a faster pace than the Youtube tutorials that were making my eyes glaze over. I feel confident I can learn a lot following along with this, instead of intermittently pecking away as I had been doing before. 

I've decided that by next week, Sunday night or Monday morning, I will have made a simple FPS level as per the tutorial. Ideally, I'll have it as something you can play by then as well. As a game it may not be too much (though tweaking it according to your guys feedback would be excellent practice for me) but you'll get a chance to get up close to some new models and splatter them with a few weapons. 

Wouldn't you like to fire a homing rocket into this things hemocyaninic mouth(s)? 

The tutorial says that by the end I'll have a level, four weapons (a machete, machine gun, rocket launcher, and shotgun), and a few enemies with simple AI. I'll be making assets for all of these things, plus a few extra decorations for the map. 

I've started working on assets and a map, using Blender both to make enemies, environments, etc. but also plot out a landscape that will become the map for the level. 

I made this digital collage in Affinity out of details from paintings and illustrations that I found on Public Domain Review. I applied filters and mirroring multiple times, to multiple layers until I had something that could be the ground of a partially terraformed volcanic Island. 

I've named this little project Xenocidaire, as you'll be running around a map killing extraterrestrials. I am feeling nostalgic for Halo and making monsters in Blender is the purest form of escapism available to me right now. 

Speaking of escapism, I'm using this project as a chance to indulge in some SF aesthetics a bit more far out than NyTavangen's brand of icky, hard-ish SF. 

Normally in science fiction I hate when a ship with no visible means of propulsion floats in atmosphere, seemingly giving off no heat, radiation, etc...But this is Xenocidaire. The player likely arrived on this world via some kind of wormhole gate, traveling to a colonized planet orbiting another star lightyears away. I'm not sure what star this planet  is orbiting but I plan to nerd out and figure out what the lighting should be like based on that choice. 

I was recently asked about my process for gathering and collating reference and inspirational images, so I thought I'd show one of the little collages I sometimes make. 

Simon Roy, Wayne Barlowe, and other sources I can't remember off the top of my head. All good fodder for designing one of the living spaceships that are common to Xenocidaire. 

When I started I'd just start making a thing and then decide its purpose in the game and world after. I'm sure I'll continue to do that, but as I get more organized and stories become more concrete, I've been going in with a goal for what I want and gather images accordingly.

You can't fight aliens without a drop ship, or without a weird antigravity thing for them to fly in on. For Xenocidaire I want a classic space blimp to drift over the map, casting shadows and generally being ominous. Maybe it's full of enemy troops. Maybe it contains your back up or allied soldiers being dropped elsewhere. I'm not sure what it will be yet, but I'll start by exploring these shapes and seeing where it leads me. I plan to make a new texture for this thing as well. I'm sure you'll see some version of it on twitter as I poke around and settle on something I like. 

Thursday I'll post a progress report as well as animations. I plan to have some weapons done by then and I'm excited to show you my first forays into making character equipment. There'll also be a brief lore dump on the world of Xenocidaire. Of course .

See you then.