Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

An in depth video this week focusing on tilesets and doors. I'm happy with how they are working right now so I'm going to move on to items and inventory. You can see the video here if it doesn't display.

You can get a look at how the tileset looks in this short video Blog: TILESETS  I'm working on lighting and tile visibility. I'm also about to start work on doors.

It's difficult to show the way tiles look in game with static images, so if you want to see a gif there's one here . It's important that the different textures work well together, the Normal map, the diffuse texture and others have to bring out the 3d effect without overwhelming the viewer with too much detail. Here's an example of a diffuse texture: There's quite a bit of small scale detail, the little plants and things, but the large scale contrast is quite subdued. There's no very dark areas and no very light areas. This is the most difficult thing to get right. As I talked about last year, it's no good having an amazing tile set if you can't see any of the characters or other details. Here's the floor so far: This is just one variation of floor tile. The final version would have several different tiles to choose from when generating the level so it doesn't repeat so much. The look I'm aiming for is a kind of tabletop rolep...

30 minutes later +/- some thinking time and the time it took to write the blog I've got some basic tiles in game for testing. The first thing I noticed about the tiles in game was that the initial texture was too high contrast. The characters and monster disappeared in to the background. So I lightened them up. I also added a quick bit of code to randomly rotate them by multiples of 90 degrees. The final version would include more variants of the tiles, as well as some that can be placed around the edge of a pit. Adding the gravel was pretty painless, and later I can add bloodstains, moss and other stuff to add a bit more interest to the levels. Here's what the tiles look like up close as a group: This was before reducing the diffuse contrast. It looks great, but it is too busy. It becomes difficult to play the game. Not every tile would be cracked in the finished version though and not every one would have gravel or other details. So I have to strike a balance...

It's been a while since I did anything graphical, but I feel the need to see how the game will look once there's more than just cubes as dungeon. I also need to test some of the dungeon building ideas I've had lately. Lastly, I feel that it's important to come up with a fast, and good way of decorating a dungeon. For the last 30 minutes I've been working on a single paving slab. That might not seem like good time management, but I didn't spend the whole 30 minutes making it. I experimented with some quick and dirty ways of modelling stone. First I created a cube, scaled it to a tile (2.0,2.0,0.2), beveled the edges and cut it with the loop cut tool. (Previously I tried the boolean modifier, but that took too long and didn't give good results).  After that I added some subdivision with fractal noise and smoothing. Next I unwrapped a stone texture and used that as a basic displacement map to provide the micro texture. Last I created a low poly tile a...

A lot of work this week, but you can't really see any of it. I've been setting up the interface between the player and all the controls. Now I have a way of entering any kind of command I need in a way which is (IMHO) pretty easy to get to grips with. Here's the early concept: [radial menu with two levels] This was my first concept, that you would use the radial menu to switch to a non-game state and from there you could use direction keys and space to set up various parts of the game. But I thought it would be better if the radial menu could be expanded with multiple layers to handle things directly in game without entering a non-game state. So now you can control the camera, perform actions and feats, give orders, switch characters, set default AI behavior and other things right in the game. [8 level radial menu] And all layers lead back to the main layer, so hopefully you can't get lost in the menus. Some interactions though still need to enter ...