Monster design: Creating a family.

Some new monster designs today, I'm really happy with the texture painting workflow I've ended up with. I'd really like to be able to make more high poly creatures, but the more detail in an animated character in game, the more processing power it requires. Static objects run OK even when quite high poly, but for creatures and other animated objects, they present a bit of a bottleneck.

I've already got a whole bunch of monsters, and I've tried to reuse armatures as much as possible, because not only does it reduce time spent on re-rigging the meshes, but also requires less time to animate.

However, the monsters that I do have are quite diverse, maybe a bit too much so. The different levels of the dungeon are going to look like a zoo at this rate. So I've been thinking about how to create themes for different levels of the dungeon. In effect, take one monster and build a family of monsters around it.

I already have two kinds of plant men, diseased and healthy, I wondered how plant men procreate, and decided that the female plant man has a toxin which can transform humans and other creatures in to plant men.

So here is the female plant creature, part human, part plant, all monster.

In the same way I want to diversify the fish men I already have, so I decided on having an adult fish man, and a larval form.

These guys are pretty slow, but quite strong. They are the juvenile version of the adult fish man:

Or maybe a different species, I haven't decided yet. Once they are in game I'll decide what to do with them. I may just leave it up to the player's imagination to decide what they are.

Now that I've got a half fish half human monster armature, I'll probably make a mermaid as an NPC. :) There are going to be some NPCs in the game who can trade you stuff or give you a special quest or even join your team. The mermaid would probably ask you to find her lost shell or something like that. Though perhaps a swearing, foul mouthed mermaid who sends you after a barrel of extra strength booze might be more fun.

Comments

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...

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.

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...

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