Hey everyone! Hope you're all having a great weekend!
Today is my 'background' day. Sundays usually run like this for me - where I might be doing some odd engine work, odd modelling work (maybe texture designs, or animation fix ups in the engine - the smaller jobs). This day also includes getting into my Patreon work and, of course, the Steam page updates!
I have also finished stitching together and publishing a new dev log to my Youtube channel, which you can watch here:
SATELLITE FUN IN BLENDER - plus sneak peek into build!
Work continues nicely in Blender. Again, I've been roaming the realms of Blender now for about a month roughly, after having lived in the Visionaire Studio 5 game engine world for a while. Revamps to a set I'd created in 2018 are coming along VERY nicely! Some really awesome updates, design choices and evolutions compared to the previous set from 2018.
Recent satellite design for the environment I'm focussing on currently
Blender is where it all started for Neyyah. I used to use another software called Anim8or (www.anim8or.com) - that's where I picked up 3D modelling in my teens, and much later, picked up Blender in 2018. The rendering results blew me away, so I knew I had to use this for Ne... Well. Not Neyyah. It was another game I was developing beforehand, and Neyyah took charge! Neyyah came about in July 2018, very soon after picking up the basics of Blender.
While my work in 2018 / 2019 was cool, the upgrade in hardware here at Defy Reality Entertainment, and the progress and evolution in my work flow that continued from this point, pushed Neyyah to other levels, raised the bar in the visuals - in various ways!
2018 artwork / rendered in 2021 for the Felitsu Island Walkway test build
While the graphics remained beautiful (using action lists I'd created in Photoshop), the actual model elements, and some of the texture art, lacked the detail in which I'd been working with through 2020 onwards. Neyyah's world evolves during development, and I think it's important to let a game world breathe in this way, and grow.
Recent revamp work on the same scene as above! The models have been redesigned to fit Neyyah's more recent aesthetic style
There'll be many other alterations / variations in Neyyah's environment design along the rest of the development journey ahead. However, it's important to keep a coherent feel throughout, and this established through having core cultural flavours within Neyyah's world. Some of these are minute, while others are very obvious, but it all comes down to one thing: telling story within the world. Reflecting the characters within the game through the world design. This is very important, especially if characters don't appear too much within the gameplay!
Another area of this particular scene that I have revamped recently is a 'forcefield' ring, which also featured prominently in the Felitsu Island Walkway test build playthrough from a year ago - available to watch here:
While I was happy with the look of the ring, it still didn't fit with how much Neyyah has grown since, in its environmental style and how the story had evolved since to push this artistic bar higher.
So, from this ...
the 2018 original forcefield ring - this render created in 2021 for last year's test build (link above for the gameplay video)
To this ...
The new forcefield ring, created recently
I think one of the biggest evolutions in Neyyah's environmental design is the inclusion of terrain. Aroudn 2020, I started experimenting more with terrain and foliage, which delivered a nice contrast to the otherwise steampunky, mechanical theme I had set for Neyyah's foundations. I think over time this became more balanced, and the new revamp on this set will definitely show this!
Feel free to have a watch of last week's dev log video too, which shows another example of taking what I'd created in 2018 and bringing it to the current Neyyah game screen:
Hope you enjoyed this dev update, fellow Neyyah adventurers!
Thanks for having a look, and if you like what you see on the Youtube dev logs, please like, subscribe, comment and stay tuned for more dev logs coming soon!
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment