Devlog Week 12

Hello this is the devlog for week 12. I worked on a bunch of things, listed below.

1 – Blockout of a traditional stone and clay house to check scale and placement, and to also understand the architecture. I’m happy with the shapes and overall design, I’ll leave this aside for now and blockout other houses before making any final detailed assets.

It was more challenging that I expected, despite growing up around houses like these. I never actually thought of the architecture in a functional and methodical way. What were the material and tool limitations, weather and other factors that affected the architecture that made it this way and so on. I guess even if you lived in a normal house, that doesn’t mean you can design one from scratch without studying the way it was made first.
It was more challenging because there are very few resources online about it online, but luckily by pure coincidence I found an art book and another book about old Kabyle houses and architecture, and I immediately bought both.
I also tried a third person perspective. I had to bring the camera much closer to the player and move it a little bit to the right and increase the FoV, because otherwise it would be too claustrophobic in tight interiors.

2 – A basic clay texture and a trim sheet with masks for the walls. I’ll revisit those back later.

3- Some improvements to the master material :

• Made an option to switch between RGB and grayscale masks. For when I need to control up to 4 colors individually (Base, R, G, and B). I will maybe even make it 5 in the future if I also include Alpha, but I doubt it.

• Added individual roughness control for each mask for finer control
• Added a toggle to switch between fast and high quality triplanar mapping. The fast one only uses one texture sample per texture, and it works by manipulating UV, so it offers no blending between seams. The high quality one is just the standard implementation which I’ll use for the majority of cases, except the very low quality graphics setting maybe.
• Reorganized the parameters and sorted them in categories to make things easier.

4 – Continued following the Environment Art Mastery course by Thiago Clafke, chapters 4-7, which talked mostly about blockouts and related.

5- spent some time on the story and some mechanics and progression. It’s mostly notes about the main story, especially what’s essential to the world building and the characters as a whole.

I’m not entirely sure what to work on this week, but we’ll see. See you next time!