Hey everyone!
Last week was fairly productive, and while I initially planned on discussing some of the optimisation (I managed to get a minimum of 30 FPS in my latest build) and the bugs ensuing from it, I think this blog may be better spent on explaining why everything is taking longer than expected.
When we started this project, John was taking care of the entire art side of the project. This came with a steep learning curve, many failed (and successful) attempts, and ultimately resulted in what I believe to be a relatively unique artstyle for the game, which John and I both enjoy.
For a number of professional and personal reasons, John has not been able to dedicate as much time to the project as of last year as we both would have liked, and as a result, I took over a lot of the art side responsibilities, such as creating shaders as well as the world building for Pirates’ Peak. While a lot of the code for 0.8 had already been finished by mid last year, this meant that creating the art for 0.8 now had to happen after, and it has as a result taken a lot longer than expected.
At this point, we decided that we should try to bring in additional artists that could help us bridge some of the gap between the time John can work on the game and the speed at which we would like to progress. This did, however, come with additional issues: a lot of the artstyle of the game developed very organically, lots of it (e.g. the buildings and villagers) are still mostly placeholders, and we now had to communicate to other artists what we needed from them. Today’s image shows two buildings for comparison: the smelter (right) being an early placeholder building, while the charcoal hut (left) is a more recent building, much closer to what we want (but not finalised yet).
As a result, a lot of John’s and my recent work has been dedicated to trying to determine how to put our process on creating art into clear instructions for others, to plan for future art direction and developments, and to try to figure out exactly where we wanted to draw the line for further improvements. I am glad to say that I think we have finally gotten a good idea of that, even though we still have to work out some of the details.
Knowing the direction we want to take has also meant that we could focus on creating some high quality assets that would be shared among the buildings, and that could help us create a consistent feel. In that sense, John has recently been focusing on creating new materials for the various walls, roofs, etc. of the buildings, and we really like the approach and outcome we have ended up with. It will be a little while before we have enough of these assets to create the new buildings, but putting them together from well made assets should really speed up our process.
With that being said, we also decided that we would create some of the new buildings as placeholders again, so we can turn them out quickly, and finally get to experimental branch 0.8 even before finalising all of the high quality assets.
More on the optimisation and bugs next week!
Until next week!