I took a week off, so this technically should be weeks 85-87. I spent a lot of time on job hunting and networking as usual, but I also experimented with the Unreal project.
Robot Dog sketches
This was unplanned, but I added it to my schedule anyway and moved another small task for next weeks. I was going to add an animal into the game, but I was wondering if it’s going to be a real dog or a robot. I made a few sketches and experimented with the idea, I wanted to see if I can make something I like. Here are a few of them.
I ultimately went with a simpler head shape that resembles the real dog anatomy closer.
I detailed a little bit more and started working on the other parts of the body. Just like I did with the main robot model, I segmented it and made a few benchmark poses to make sure nothing intersects.
Not all poses are feasible however, so they have to be altered. Mainly sitting on its hind legs. However the alternative pose is adorable on its own, so it’s not an issue.
Trees
I never made trees for games before, and I needed to test their performance, so this was the right opportunity.
I started with modelling a few twigs, then baking them into an atlas texture and painting then in Substance Painter.
After that I used The Grove to grow a few trees, then optimized it by deleting all the small branches and decimating the medium ones.
the leaves look flat from certain angles, so I can’t use them in foregrounds, but they’re perfect for backgrounds. In the future I will made the twigs more geometric and detailed. It’s a good learning opportunity.
Mini Game
I thought of adding a “karting” mini game, where some kids in the village have makeshift boards and race them. I already have the prototype from HuskyDrift, and the physics work perfectly for it. I also have this nice curved road, it starts nice and slow, and then builds speed and leads into the village. I’ll swap the models and add animations eventually, but it’s low priority for now.
House props
I made more props for the house scene. Some fruit and vegetables, rough cement flooring, and a CRT TV.
The lighting needs rework, but this is what it looks like so far.
It runs great on the SteamDeck too, constantly getting 90FPS at native resolution. I boosted the saturation a bit, to compensate for its reduction due to my current implementation of the dithering effect.
Misc
Other things I did :
- Made shader improvements to the blended material shader : option to only use 2 layers and/or a simplified blending (no height blend). Disabled snow and wetness by default.
- Job applications and networking
- Watched videos and talks about story and character writing and analyzed a few movies and games
- Various experiments and performance tests. Too many to list here, but the main conclusion is that I need to investigate performance a bit more closely if I need to stick to 60FPS at native rendering. But I can always go back to using TSR if necessary, maybe give the players a choice between performance and quality?
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again soon.