Friday Update but Late #2

Sorry, all, no video this week. I got “stuck” in a busy cycle. It was also Father’s Day so I enjoyed it with a glass of wine and an hour or two of Nioh. But it was a very busy and productive week.

So what was done?

A real user Interface is making it’s way. Health and energy bars, quick slots and other control mechanisms are making their way into the game. Special Abilities are being added and worked on. Critical hit and combat roles and rules are being worked out. Story line being written. Lots of all around progress, not bad for a single person.

The meat of it all – Art Direction

It’s true at this time, I’m Using Assets from the Unity store. This presents a consistency problem. Too many various art styles to contend with. While they’re pseudo placeholders (if I can get funding to hire artists…) I’m going forward assuming the art is permanent.

But this is not a huge issue. I’ve really taken time this week to convert textures over from Legacy to PBR. Thanks to the folks at Infinity PBR (SFBay) they have an amazing tool to do just that leveraging the SBSAR file format. The issue is that there are “bugs” and Unity is exponentially slower as I add more files to batch convert. So I can really only do 2 at a time. This is how I actually. Got Nioh time 🙂

So far the results have been impressive. Adding in Color ID maps to separate metals, glass and wood from the old legacy texture files has been impressive. Glass and metals shimmer. Wood and stone are more dull. It has really brought life to old, flat textures. There’s even enhanced height maps.

It ended up being a 12 hour ordeal to setup, configure and start converting the 70 textures in the Mediaeval World pack. Thankfully most textures did not need ColorID maps. Those that did became an interesting learning experience. I’m not going to do every texture, but I’ll convert the most important.

I also have a decent start with the Procedural Dungeon generation. With the new PBR textures it’ll be a breath of new life in old assets. I “might” even find a way to reincorporate Multilevel Dungeons. Maybe it’ll be saved for a raw hack and slash.

Thank you

Next Friday I should have better results to show and a video demonstration. Things are progressing fast, and at the same time too slow for my tastes. I love doing this and don’t mind the 16 hour days, including weekend work.