The Rise of Dagon: Week of 6/28 Update

This update encompasses the weeks of 6/28 and 6/21 due to the previous week I skipped my update because my day job required overtime work.  We shipped a major version release and I had to work extra to help ship the release -- including the full weekend!

I did get a few small things done during that previous week but felt it would be better to combine that smaller amount of work in with this weeks update for a nicer full update.

So the first thing I did was work on Substance related textures for the level design aspect of the game.

I was able figure out run-time controls for the Substance textures! This is a super cool feature where  in the level editor you can change the appearance of the level's textures depending on the parameters I expose in the substance designer.

Things like the color, the specular level, the tiling of the x/y of the texture, or even more interesting effects like the 'dirt' level of the texture.

In this short video I am demoing a toggle button of the dirt level of the texture; toggling between a 'clean' texture and a 'dirty' texture as one potential parameter as well as the new dialogue system (discussed further below).

The Rise of Dagon : Week of June 14 Update

This week was mostly about work on the level file format for the game.

I've had it in the back of my mind since starting the game how I might like to have the level format look like.

However once the actual form of the prefabs started taking place plans had to change just a bit ; I knew this would happen of course so its the reason I did a fair bit of exploratory work on the prefabs before attempting to begin work in earnest on the level format.

First thing was to sketch out in my handy (physical) notepad several ideas.

What was interesting is that putting it down on paper made it much more concrete about which items were going to be important for the level format.

This picture was the first sketch which looks a little interesting but wasn't what I went with:

In the end I was able to create a first pass level format and lay out some level details in much more particular than the larger prefabs I had been working with previously.  This is actually quite a good thing as it will permit the level format to have much more varied content.  

My previous efforts would have had all the corner pieces always exactly the same (just rotated).  Now I can have a corner that has a shelf on one wall or a  cracked wall on one side and a normal wall on the other side. The extra level of detail will help keep the levels from feeling too static!

Next up I did a fair bit of work throughout the week on the lighting and some shader work to go along with it.

The Rise of Dagon : Week of June 7th Update

This week was very diverse week for productivity! I have updates on Interface GUI , Character Models, and a first pass on my Level Editor to share.

First up we have a wizard base model.  There are actually a couple of wizard like character that will appear (friendly and otherwise).  The very first plot based NPC is a wizard in fact so I wanted to get a base model started early on.

So at this point I could branch out and make different hoods (or no hood) different sleeves, and robe tassles or other features that would result in a fair amount of end variety. Also the texturing and faces could be potentially swapped out for more variety if it looks too similar.

 Next up we have the first pass at the player interface for the GUI.  The player bars traditionally have a player portrait and slots for  your left and right hand with status bars for health and mana.