Skip to main content

Trolls

It may seem like the monsters I've been making are pretty undetailed, even old fashioned compared to more modern games, but I'm going for a certain look with the game, and the smaller characters allow me to get more on screen at once.

Even a big creature like the stone troll will be pretty small on screen, so the low poly and small texture sheet approach is just right for the game. Here's a picture of a couple of trolls at around real screen size:



You can zoom in a bit in game, and when they are animated you can see more of the details, but generally it's not that important to see every single tooth, or individual eyeballs, even with a character like this. I'm trying to create a look which is reminiscent of the old 2d RPGs, kind of like  3d pixel art. (similar to this)

Why? Because I'm working on my own, and I need to choose a simplified art style just to make sure I can make the required amount of assets in a reasonable amount of time.

A game like Skyrim has a team of 100 developers working full time for 3 years. For my project there's only me for a couple of hours each night, so I have to choose an art style which is achievable. 10 years ago it would have taken me weeks to make a monster like the one above, but these days there are so many handy tools that I can increase my workflow ten fold. It takes me a single evening to make a monster from start to finish.

EDIT:
For monsters which already have a mesh and armature it takes just an hour or two to bash together a reskinned version of the monster for use on other levels. I made a plant ogre for the vegetation level, or perhaps a sea troll:

It has an alternative walk cycle and attack animations so the fact that it reuses the base troll armature won't really be noticeable in game.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra
7 comments
Read more

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t
3 comments
Read more