There is so much going into making a game, you wouldn't believe. Or maybe you would, if you've been dabbling in making interactive content. Any-a-who, I needed to replace an SSD so while I'm waiting for everything to be done file-wise with the new drive, why not post a lesser update?
At the moment, the block of content being worked on is the one with all the new fun monsters of act 2. This means to (sometimes in an annoyingly iterating loop) do something like this...
Blender
Model the monster; vertices + lines + polygons, all sorts of shenanigans.
Rig the monster; create a skeleton that covers bigger and smaller limbs (down to each individual knuckle sometimes).
Weight paint; make sure all parts of the model know what bone(s) they're influenced by.
Animate; make all necessary idle, walk, attack, get up, etc. animations.
Substance Painter
Texture; putting that lipstick on. Make them look good enough to play with.
Audacity
Record; grunt and scream in a microphone until the neighbors call the police on you.
Edit audio; reverberate, normalize, remove bad audio, etc.
Unity
Add a ragdoll; make them be able to fall down well. Don't have their head fall down into their chest, etc.
Configure/balance; give them values like speed, attack speed, attack damage, elemental immunities.
Special logic; many of the new monsters have their own ability that set them apart from their brethren.
Put them in game; put them in the right levels, in the right waves, in the right numbers for 1-4 players.
Many of these steps can be slightly easier by sometimes extrapolating from an existing enemy model, finding a suitable metarig that's close enough (and remove several, like hundreds, of facial bones), finding the right "whoosh" sound in a bought sound library to expand upon, and so on. But all in all, it takes a lot of time to just get a single monster done.
That's it for the small update, I think. The SSD is usable soon!
Here are some of the upcoming act 2 monsters. I wonder if you can spot something special about them, like if they have an ability that will have you cursing worse then when you faced your first Voodoo Mishap.
Cheers!
