Blog - Page 8

Good morrow!

Time for an update from the fledgling project! I've fleshed out more of what the mechanics will be, setting, theme and so on. So without further ado:

Theme and Name

The project I am working on is going to be a medieval tournament sim game, which I am going to call "Tourney".

Setting

I have been applying lots of time and thought into establishing the setting for the game. I didn't know whether to make it exist in the real world or a fantasy one. Each has it's benefits. For example if it's complete fantasy then the world can be populated with any monsters, potions or lore I feel like. I decided not to do that since this game will be concerned specifically with the medieval tournament. I felt it would make sense that it existed in the real world a little.
That being said I thought I would cheat a tiny bit, and use a fantasy setting that is thought to be on Earth, such as Avalon or Atlantis. Visitors can then come from real places or made up ones. The player will know that at least to some extent it is not supposed to be completely historically accurate.

Houses

Along with (and completely dependent on) the musings about settings was the consideration about where the tourney visitors would come from. Medieval knights were often affiliated with a house. As a result I decided to come up with 13 playable houses.



Each house is based on or references something in some way. For example some are based on real historical houses. Some are from Arthurian legend and a couple from pop culture. Each house will have a selection of knights you can summon to the tourney, and if you get the reference then you will know who your "star players" will be without having to experiment.

Textures

Now that is done, I need to make 13 varieties of textures for any knight related model (shield / horse / tent / armour) so that they all display the house heraldry. I am hoping that in doing this it will serve the same purpose in the game as it used to on the medieval battlefield, allowing commanders to be easily recognised amongst large armies.

Exilian

I have also got a dev log thread over here on the Exilian forums, so if you'd like to comment or ask questions about this then please head over there and get involved. You'll also find a wealth of other creative game / art / writing content there so feel free to just go have a bit of a browse!

Anyway that's all for now. I'll cover a specific knight I've completed in more detail in a post next week.

 

The last few weeks I've been moving forward on a few different "tracks" for the new project.

One main track is the creation of 3d models. Specifically, I'm working on making peasants to be part of a dynamically generated medieval crowd. Here is a big image showing the creation of the latest lady pezzy. Starting with the initial sketch a profile is drawn. That forms the basis of the model. After that it is textured. You can see that initially the pallette is only black & white, which allows me to then create a few different colour schemes for the same model.



It's not fine detail, and a little stylised. The reason for this is that the game will be "top down" (in the vein of most sim games, I think). You can't get very close to the models, so they don't actually need to be that detailed. It matters more what the overall effect will be once there are a few of them. Below is a demontration of this. The fourth lady pezzy joins in with the others having a good time drinking in a field.

 

Greetings update fans!

Well Escape From BioStation is released to the wild, and I've not really provided any update since, which is awfully rude, isn't it?

It would be untrue to say I've not done anything in the interim. On the contrary - I have been beavering away behind the scenes on the next project. However I wish to not reveal too much about it just yet. Even though I am absolutely dying to because I think it's going to be a whole truckload of fun.

The reason I'm "keeping a lid" on things would be clear if you have read my previous post. However to summarise:

• I released my last game far too early, it looked like crap hardly anyone was interested.
• Those crappy images became the first thing people saw since I'd smeared them far and wide around the net, meaning they were frequently the first thing people ever saw even when there were far better looking images and footage later on
• Those (few) people that were interested had to wait an awfully long time before the release to actually see anything.
• There is also a small silly paranoid part of me that is scared that someone might steal my idea

So for now the only people I've told are my nearest and dearest. I think that when there is a sufficient cohesive thing to demonstrate I'll say what the game is because I am very excited about it. It really draws on the lessons I learned from biostation, and builds on them hugely - yet at the same time is a complete departure in terms of game style and theme.

I don't mind saying it will be a top down game set in medieval times. In the coming couple of months I will share shorter, more frequent posts just about the parts of the project I can demonstrate, for example 3d modelling or the top level framework of mechanics - and hopefully that may be of interest until there is some context to attach what I'm posting about to.

So for now, inbetween posts, I will be frequenting twitter droning on about abstract & contextless dev I'm doing and retweeting stuff of interest. So please feel free to say hi on there!