Rampant Gaming!

Coyote · Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 1:56 pm Post subject: More WIP pics....

Some dungeon-creation our dwarven engineers are working on:

http://rampantgames.com/blogimages/FKtemp_Image2.gif

http://rampantgames.com/blogimages/FKtemp_Image4.gif
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Hajo · Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 2:19 pm Post subject:

Looking good Smile

I remember a dwarf explaining that only rocks are true friends, because they endure the time without changes, they are stable and reliable. The pictures just reminded me of this.

YakumoFuji · Level 3 Seeker Joined: 03 Mar 2008 Posts: 46

to me, its more a sewer. very quakelike.

nice! torque certain lends itself to indoor environments rather than outdoor but I guess its the whole enclosed texture vs wide open space
_________________
My Indie CRPGs and Roguelikes at http://mega-tokyo.com/blog

Coyote · Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 11:01 pm Post subject:

Torque is pretty good about outdoor areas - the reason I went with it was because it had a good blend of a functional, easy (ish) to use terrain engine AND indoor CSG-based areas.

What I failed to recognize at the time I made my choice was how limited the interior handling really was. It's improved over the years, at least, so it works for my purposes... but I really wish it handled things as nicely as, say, Quake III.

But still - it's good enough for the game, I think.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Coyote · Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 11:20 am Post subject:

Hobgoblin Bunker - principle geometry and lighting is done. Needs a bit of cool detailing though. And it's awfully... brown. Though I don't envision their military bunker being particularly colorful...

Oh, and this are my own creations - don't blame these on Brian or Kevin. They are much better than me.

The latter one is actually an area where the modified bunker gives way to a natural cave area that it was built within. It's small, but crucial.

I do like the way the lighting worked in these three images, though I'll probably have to crank up the ambient a bit in the final version. Nobody likes to play in the dark.

I also really like how that third image somehow came out looking a little bit more like a hand-drawn image. I wish the whole game could look like that.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Hajo · Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 3:53 am Post subject:

Coyote · Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 2:33 pm Post subject:

The hobbies are much taller than regular goblins - they are human-sized.

As to the irregular brick size - I'll take a look at it. They are going to be a lot more - uh, splotched - eventually. But the hobgoblins are much more disciplined than your average monster group. But the regular-sized bricks may make it look too modern, I agree.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Coyote · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 1:01 am Post subject:

And here's a little peek into my bizarre development methodology -

For many dungeons, I start out by creating the floorplan. And then I test the floorplan, usually sticking the skeleton dungeon a couple hundred feet in the air in a test environment. After I test out the floorplan, I add the walls, ceilings, doorways, etc. Then I do things like adding lights, massaging the textures, etc.

Here's one level in very early development being tested this way:

Not particularly exciting, huh? But it's how I evolve the dungeons...
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Hajo · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 1:55 am Post subject:

Seems to be a good idea. At least it gives a good and immediate impression of the spatial layout, sizes and connections Smile

I've been wondering what this room is good for:
http://rampantgames.com/blogimages/FKHobBunker2_640.jpg

Is that a storage room? Or maybe a sleeping room or such - with the gallery, maybe hobgoblin soldiers rest/sleep up there, and the awake ones use the lower floor?

Coyote · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 2:41 am Post subject:

It's a barracks room - both floors filled with cots and footlockers.

And yeah, getting sizes right was initially very tricky. I discovered a long time ago that making a map of exact real-world sizes results in something probably unnavigable in a game that seems entirely too small. The trick is finding just how much bigger than real life you need to make everything - and it really depends on your bounding box size, movement speed, eye position, and a host of other variables.

Besides checking scale and walk-through time, I found on the bunker that I'd constantly underestimated the amount of head-room needed for stairways - I'd constantly get stuck because there wasn't enough vertical space to let me exit the stair well. It's nice to learn this BEFORE I've spent a lot of time locking in the details that would be painful to undo or change.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Bad Sector · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 3:36 am Post subject:

Coyote · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 8:14 am Post subject:

Yep, I do that too. It helps a lot. But there are still a lot of things that might look fine from a third-person view that still don't look right or work right in first person.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Hajo · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 2:15 am Post subject:

I once had made an 3D maze game, that had in-game editing abilities. It was real cool to carve out rooms, texture walls, place objects and such while being in the game, seeing the effect from the real view.

The game was block-based, though, which made such editing much easier than the 3D modeling that you need to do ... was just reminded when you told that sometimes the 3rd person view is not sufficient to get some details right.

Coyote · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 8:01 am Post subject:

I'll tell ya - the more complicated I make things, the more I wish I were working on something simpler like that. There's a lot that you can do that's very cool when you have less to worry about on the foundation.
_________________
Rampant Games
Games With Personality!

Hajo · Posted: Fri Nov 20, 2009 2:36 am Post subject:

Lately I favor "simple" very much.

The strive for more and more realism and complexity in games pushed the limits beyond the border, where the amount of time needed to make even a bit of an improvement becomes unproportionally high.

I've been looking at other peoples games, and to me it seems a few people are very clever in making simple things look good, still they need a lot less time to get them done, compared to only a bit more complex projects.

I guess this is not really helpful here, since Frayed Knights is already very far developed, and must be completed in the style it started. But I saw a few times that you were wondering why other people push out games much faster - once they use different tools, and second they really try to cut corners, and only implement the essential parts of a game. So it might or might not be a remedy to know that it's just the nature of the Frayed Knights project that needs a certain amount of additional work.