As we finalize our our games core concept the team and I all went ahead and started constructing our games, with my focus being on directing the Games direction and feel along with creating the environment assets for the game.
Mamaro's Refinement
As Mentioned above we finally decided upon a the direction of the game that will encompass the overall feeling of trust, before we had 2 player's working side by side in order to achieve a sense of trust which proved to be more considerable work in implementing the right elements that give players trust in each other so instead we went with a Single player style game.
Players play as Mamaro, and there tasked with protecting little lucy from the dangers of the world, this goes back to my initial idea for the game but now has a lot more involvement, with the major focus of trust being within the player, trusting in the slaves in order to protect and trusting there better judgments whether be for good or bad.
Players play as Mamaro, and there tasked with protecting little lucy from the dangers of the world, this goes back to my initial idea for the game but now has a lot more involvement, with the major focus of trust being within the player, trusting in the slaves in order to protect and trusting there better judgments whether be for good or bad.
Tried and Tested
During Planning of Mamaro and continuing on now, I recently begun venturing into many unfamiliar territories, Both Conceptually and during development.
Designing
Becoming more entrenched in the creation of a game from the very beginning, fluid mechanics in terms of really sitting down and breaking apart what is going to happen and how i'm going to achieve this.
Me and the Team Went through many iterations in order to reach a point that we felt the game would be enjoyable, challenging and ultimately play upon the theme of trust as the core driving force of Mamaro, using themes of power and humanity to test the players and see if they can achieve the goal of protecting Lucy the harmony within the game.
Development of Mamaro along with games prototyping has taking me a long way from my original idea of what goes into a game in terms of its structure, its design intent as well as its impact upon players and the team developing it.
Me and the Team Went through many iterations in order to reach a point that we felt the game would be enjoyable, challenging and ultimately play upon the theme of trust as the core driving force of Mamaro, using themes of power and humanity to test the players and see if they can achieve the goal of protecting Lucy the harmony within the game.
Development of Mamaro along with games prototyping has taking me a long way from my original idea of what goes into a game in terms of its structure, its design intent as well as its impact upon players and the team developing it.
Sculpting
One area that is completely new to me in terms of pipeline development is the introduction to 3D sculpting, something I've been meaning to do and saw the perfect opportunity to learn as it has proven to create amazing organic structures that Mamaro so happens to need.
Sculpting has helped streamline a lot of environmental that I found i struggled to achieve, assets such as Rocks, Cliffs, tree's and many natural assets that required a lot of smaller details become a lot more easier to handle and manage thanks to learning these new techniques.
Sculpting has helped streamline a lot of environmental that I found i struggled to achieve, assets such as Rocks, Cliffs, tree's and many natural assets that required a lot of smaller details become a lot more easier to handle and manage thanks to learning these new techniques.
Optimizing
One main thing to always keep in mind though when creating these assets and pre level planning helped point this out really quickly was the amount of detail the game is rendering at a time, along with pre production assets such as
Occlusion Culling and Fog
Occlusion Culling and Fog
Set Testing
Another form of optimizing and of course is a big one when developing was the optimizing of of meshes, lowering poly counts and still find a Balance to allow for detail, one method of doing so was with using Normal maps which along with sculpting I was able to utilize.
This Allowed for drastically reduced poly counts and still able to achieve a nice looking model without pushing a computers limits to the max, this technique also opens the door to a lot of different techniques i will be utilizing to streamline the creation process.
Enviromental Development
And of course putting this all together, keeping in mind what players will see, rendering powers, what will be see and what not, how much time i'll be spending on particular assets and so on I begun working on games base environment working to create all the base elements needed and then in the coming weeks polish it along if needed.