Art work Update

Got some art from some fine talent lately. First one is a sculpt of the arms from the "arm puzzle." Alex is featured here, who also sculpted the Rachel, Janet and Stalker models. 

These are the arms that will be holding a cell door shut. They're a bit mutated, combining both flesh and plant mater. 

Steve gave us an update of a nicely done box. These will be used to store piles of patient's personal effects. I can even individually label these with an overlay effect.

Andrew gave us this model of a wall hanging blood pressure machine. Hard to see from this shot, but the display has glass cover. You'll be able to squeeze the ball and play with the need to some extent. 

Tyler is working on a model for what I call the "Dark Man" for the cell level. This is the first iteration so there will be some final morphing. 

Wasn't originally a character, he (she???) is just something that spawned from redoing the cells level about four times over now. Before I tried to do a smoke effect but couldn't come up with something that worked, then I tried a skeleton model. Decided to try something based a bit more on reality. Horror needs some grounding to the real world or else it just becomes silly. 

Next time I'll post footage of the first puzzle. 

Tech Update

The Normal Buffer Overlay Shader

Keith added a new shader that allows us to blend in a normal map into the background. The top left postage stamp shows the normal buffer blended in with the additional overlay map. This opens up the door to add a lot more character to the environment at minimal cost. 

So now we can add random cracks, water damage, bullet holes, and pretty much any surface detail without having to create entire new maps for each section. 

Design and Tools....

Since we got more help now, gotta spend more time on design and organization rather than pretty pictures at the moment. Can't stress enough how important a detailed plan is, and how current tools just seem to be so lacking. Google doesn't organize it's documents well, and I ended up spending more time looking for documents than editing them. And of course the team would all need to be added, shared, and what not, plus then you quickly run into space issues. I made a 3 page document that somehow turned into 27 megs! It was as if the images were being stored 5x over. 

So the solution? Why, create my own design system. Seems somewhat neurotic, but I've been coding for 20 years and sometimes it's easier to create a wheel than deal with the flaws of what's out there. 

New Cabinet From Dave

 

 

 

Old friend of ours from Dreamforge did a prop for us. Simple prop with four drawers that open, has the slider part with it as well, and even the bearings are in there (though you'd be hard pressed to see them.) Each drawer has its own unique set of papers as well.

 

I think back to the days of DFI. The last time I put art from him in a game it was a werewolf model that was less than 100 polys. This one has about 40k in 22 pieces. Boggles the mind when I think about how much tech has improved.

 

 

During the 1st iteration of Unreal, they told us a scene should have 200 polys if it had no creatures, 100 if you add a creature, and 50 with three or more creatures. Unreal didn't even have hardware support at the time, and when we say hardware we mean the voodoo FX card. 



Back from Vacation....

Was out for more than a week, so haven't done a game update in a while. But we're still plugging away.

Redoing the model for the skeleton guy in the cells and replaced it with a bronze statue. Was inspired by the "Verity"  in the UK
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2012/oct/17/damien-hirsts-verity-statue-hannibal-lecter

Got to do some work on the material to make it look more bronze. Perhaps some reflection map to sell it a but more.

Readable Paper Test

Readable Text Test

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tHyb2A6Ah8

 

 

Here's a video showing readable text on an object you can pick up. The text is added from a file at run time, so that means we can add any language we want. it also means we can add a ridiculous amount of readable objects as well. 

She's a pretty girl

Animation test with Rachael. Added a lip syncing system so we can match her jaw to the audio. Originally we weren't even going to have characters in the game. Then they weren't going to talk. Things always seem to snowball that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YAa_QNyRao&feature=youtu.be

Her jaw is controlled by a 1x256 texture whose color determines the jaw position. It plays iT over 3.8 seconds (depending on the length of the line.) The bitmap can be edited in real time so we can adjust how well it's matching.

She only has a jaw controller and a mouth corner controller, so at the moment we can't do anything more advanced. But I guess this is the point where we decided exactly how in depth to make it.