The Rise of Dagon

So it begins.  I'm starting my RPG! 

Today's post marks the conclusion of the first week of pre-production, prototyping, and exploratory work on  the first volume of the Chronicles of the Dead Sun : The Rise of Dagon.   

The RPG will be delivered in "chapters" so to speak so that its scope is much smaller and respective pieces are deliverable in some sort of reasonable time frame.

It's not as cliche' as it looks.  Its not an MMO, no.. its not even multiplayer!  In fact the first episode will take place in a dungeon so as to limit the scope!

After making 7 games in 2 years and churning out some of my newbie efforts I'm really ready to to start something with real depth in it.  

I want the time I spend on this to be worth it to me personally.  No matter if I sell one copy or many copies, when I'm done I'm going to sit back and feel satisfied about my time on this was well spent. 

This is a dream project for me so I really don't care how long it takes. Its going to be a great journey and I invite you to check in from time to time. Things are going to get interesting.

So I do have a great plot that I've worked on for a long time, a very rich universe that I've invented and pretty big heap of game lore to surround the events of the story in.  I'll share some of those things later but since this is the announcement post for it I wanted to lay out my first set of goals.

First and foremost I am in the pre-production and exploratory phase right now.  At this point I am working on the following:

- experimenting with art production tools to find the right look & feel that I need 

- creating the first prototype dungeon

- creating a game play combat prototype

For the look and feel I'm a little bit in a tough spot. I don't own a commercial version of  any of the AAA art production tools like 3DS Max, Zbrush, Mudbox, Maya etc.     I do own an educational license of 3DS Max; but I can't use that to produce my game as I plan on selling it.  Unfortunately the cost of commercial license is far outside of my reach so I'm using lower cost tools.

At this time I'm getting along with with low poly modelling done in  Silo 2 3D.  It  is definitely a nice low poly modeler - but it hasn't been updated in ages and has quite a few bugs that kill me from time to time.  I'm a very frequent saver; but I've still lost 30+ minutes of work due to fatal bugs in Silo about 3-4 times in the past week.    

In any case I am attempting to find my workflow to make mid-poly dungeons with high poly sculpts for the normal, specular, ambient occlusion maps and such.  So since I don't have Zbrush or Mudbox I'm having to learn Blender 3D.  Blender has been really rough to adapt too and it feels like it lacks a lot of the more polished sculpting tools that Mudbox has for instance.

So for my first update I wanted to share some of my prototyping workflow here.

Firstly I make a low poly dungeon wall segment using Silo 2 3D as seen in the first image here:

Then I increase the detail as I'm hoping to create a more physically modelled environment that still benefits from sculpting. Basically what's going on here is that all those 'extra' boxes you are seeing above are being extruded and then beveled in  3d to make actual bricks sticking out. They would still be considered low poly at this point however.

 Next we have the sculpt in Blender.  Honestly I have only done a very small handful of sculpting before and it was all in an educational version of Mudbox.   Blender is very different and lacks a lot of the type of brushes that I was used to using (or I'm just a complete noob at it - take your pic).   I t took a lot of experimentation but I was able to get it took roughly how I wanted as seen in the third shot here.

 Then I finally get it put together and I noticed that things didn't look right. I have gone back and edited my scene to do a comparison here because things didn't work out and I wanted to share what was happening.

So my beveled and extruded wall is on the left in this next image, and my 'low poly' flat wall is on the right.

As you can see from the images and close up cut outs that the higher poly extruded bricks actually turned out pretty poorly for me in this case, while the flat wall looks "okay".  

I'm certainly not satisfied with the results but it was nice to be able to get all the way through this process for the first time ever and have a little dungeon hallway sitting in front of me using normal, specular and ambient maps on the walls!

So for a first week of exploratory work I'm pretty happy. 

I hope to do updates once a week; that'll help me stay productive without doing daily updates I can balance blogging updates vs working on my game.  

See you next week!