Fantasy Game Project

About a month ago now, I started sculpting a new character, These are the three earliest screenshots I took.

I wasn't really sure at the time what I wanted to do with this character, I was perhaps going to just make a single still image with her, but the thought did occur, that it might be cool to use her in a game as well. Either way, I would need to retopologize and rig her, so that's what I did.

I kept the hanging cloth shawl and tabard-skirt-thing separate, so that I could use cloth physics on them I'm not sure it was the best move to have the quiver strap part of the basemesh, and also, ontop of the shawl. But, thats what I did, and with some extra care to weight paint and adjust vertices, it worked out okay. In the future though, I think it would probably be a good idea to keep a strap like this off the main mesh, or maybe integrated into the shawl or something? I dunno. It did turn out alright, but it was a fair amount of extra work.  I also added hair cards, and I put cloth physics on them too.

I dropped the character into unity, and put a quick free animation on.

Then I experimented with an active ragdoll system. It seemed like it was going to take quite a bit of work to make it not totally goofy, so I decided to go another direction. I modeled some trees, painted some very quick grass, switched to a kinematic character controller, and added a simple bow firing system.

Firing at nothing felt a little silly, so I added some proper aiming, and modeled up some quick archery targets.

But archery targets get a little boring too, so I modeled a goblin real quick.

I was less out of practice for the goblin, and I think I did a much better job retopologizing him.

There was some initial siliness when I put him ingame.

but it didn't take too long to sort out, and before long, I was hunting goblin.

I decided to make the world significantly larger, and added a day/night cycle.

With a big open world, came the need for level streaming, so I whipped that up real quick, its on youtube, because its a long video.

Shooting goblins that don't fight back made me feel bad, so I made them attack the player when hit.

I gave them shields next, and made them detect and attack the player on sight, instead of waiting to be hit

It did not take too long for me to realize the world was already way too big for me to actually fill up with meaningful handcrafted content, so despite the urge to really flex my level streaming, I decided not to make it any bigger, and instead turn it into an island. Unfortunately, unity doesn't let you lower terrains past 0 on the Y axis, so I had to figure out how to raise everything, without destroying work I had already done shaping the terrain and placing rocks and stuff.

I made a short video on that proccess, its pretty simple. Just a massive brush for your terrains with no falloff, and then moving everything up.

So I did that, and sculpted out the coastline, and made a quick ocean shader.

Here's how the world looks currently from the scene view, with fog turned off.

The ocean shader still need some work, though it is a bit better than it was when I recorded that video.

Anywho. I made all the goblins fight eachother.

At the time of recording, I think this was a free for all, but I added a faction system in almost immediately after. Goblins will fight anyone/thing thats not a member of their tribe.

The world is really missing animal life. I want to add lots of animals, if I continue this project, anyways. I started with a bear, because bears are pretty cool.

I have a screenshot sculpting the bear before I added hair, that I took by accident while showing my bear reference board, and complaining that bears are massive hairballs and its hard to pin down their anatomy.

I mean seriously, like, every picture of these guys looks different.

Look at this adorable enormous bear I found. Crazy.

I know they look huggable, but stay away from bears, they're dangerous.

Anyways,

I sculpted some fur for him, I haven't actually sculpted fur before, I've done a bit of hair work, but nothing so complete and full like this. He's maybe not the best, but I finished him in about 4-5 hours, start to finish, including retopology and rigging. So atleast he was quick, and atleast I can probably populate a full forest of different animals without spending weeks to months on it.

The next day I gave him teeth and a tongue real quick

My brother suggested adding sunglasses.

He's obviously much cooler with sunglasses, though I did not include them when I put him ingame.

I whipped up a walkcycle, and got him moving ingame.

And here the bear is, absolutely smashing some goblins.

And uh yeah, that's really all I got for now I did also add a staff/staff attack for the player, but it's not particularly interesting, and I think I want to rework a lot of combat stuff. if I continue with the project. I'm just not really sure I want to make a game around this character, or, perhaps more accurately, the gameplay I'm imagining, that would be fun, wouldn't work with the loose backstory/character traits I've pictured for this character. They're a ranger, and I never really play rangers in D&D or action games or anything. It might be better to give the player some freedom in who their character is, letting them choose/build/make a class, and level in different directions.

I could also just abandon it altogether, and make a game about a cool bear with sunglasses. I dunno. I gotta get a day job again pretty soon, so gamedev stuff will slow down / go on the backburner.