Progress update…

Although there hasn’t been much updates in the blog, work has been very productive lately…

First of all, Rincewind has started modeling the new “Grey” character, based on this concept

I may have posted this before, but there you go… He has a more “wildman” streak to it, which is a bit more different than the usual “mage in flowing robes”… Grey isn’t a normal mage anyway!

Second, we’ve enlisted the help of a friend of mine, Pedro Daniel from Phobos Anomaly Design to help us build the UI for the game. Rincewind doesn’t like to do that kind of stuff, and Pedro is an incredibly talented graphical artist, which is a match made in heaven… Although we’re still in the mockup phase, here’s a sneak peak:

You can check out more stuff from Daniel on his personal website: http://pedrodanieldesign.com/ , or the Phobos Anomaly Design facebook page. Be sure to check his awesome band Before The Rain as well!

Next week we’ll probably close the details on the UI so he can make the final assets for it. He’s already done an amazing wallpaper for the game, but I’ll save that for another occasion!

On another topic, Rincewind has been complaining about the terrain being too flat and square, and being a nice guy that I am, I created a “terrain shader”, which takes some masks, some tileable textures, and the normal of the terrain and builds a very cool looking terrain from any mesh:

Changing the mesh topology (and nothing else):

Finally, I spent some time in the last couple of weeks sorting out small bugs in the editor and doing a big revamp on the 3d Package DCC plugins… Now I can configure every parameter of the shaders directly from the DCC tool, change geometry, see the effect, etc… It’s very cool! Also fixed issues with the shadows (so they work properly in the tool), and Rincewind can now see the animations with interpolation (instead of just keyframes) so he can fine tune them when he’s making them… A lot of stuff indeed:

The fiery blob looks very neat in motion… The two “grass blocks” are the tinting system in action (another shader).

All in all, these last weeks were very productive… I managed to eliminate all known bugs on the tools, so I can get back to making Grey itself… We’ve shelved Purgatory for now, since it reached the point in which it’s basically a scripting effort (and as such, it doesn’t benefit Grey directly) to dedicate ourselves more to the “important” game…

I wish to have at least some gameplay ready in the next couple of weeks, with Grey life-shaping and attacking enemies, and vice-versa… Hopefully that will allow us to make a “video-blog” thing…

There’s still one million things to be done, but it’s starting to come together!

Catch you on another blog update!