Posts Tagged ‘Dev Log’

Greetings everyone!

I’ve been working recently on some more maps for Rooks Keep, and I do have plenty of ideas that I think would cool to see, but only a few can be made. I’ll go over the progress so far here, starting with our first map that we’ve used for all our screenshots up until now.

Courtyard:

I’ve added some new foliage and changed the trees in the Courtyard this time. There are a few passes we need to do still, but it’s nearly done. Every now and then, i’ll update it with some new features, textures or details, especially with each new UDK release.

Forest:

Forests are cool! Right? Well, i’ve wanted to add one to Rooks Keep since the early stages, so i finally got around to it. Save for some mesh work (on the trees and cliff’s), it’s mostly done. I’ve created some foliage and trees to add to improve the forests, so those will go in soon.

Fields:

This map i created just this morning basically. I created some trees and textures last night, then just this morning created some more textures, imported the meshes, and then made the map. I really like how it turned out for just a couple hours work. There are a bunch of improvements i need to make, but i’m pleased that the idea for the setting works well!

Crypt:

This started more of an exercise in theme than a map idea. But the way it turned out was awesome, so i turned it into a playable environment. Made some dead trees, grabbed the gravestones from The Crucible, and added them all into the place, and here we are!

RedYard:

I’ve wanted to create an environment like this for a while, the red sky, the weird lighting. It took about a day to get the bulk of it made, then a bit of the next day to polish it up a bit. I’ve got to work on the sky a bit, because the orange sun doesn’t match the blue sunlight quite yet

Keep:

Just another map I whipped up quickly with the batch of meshes from the Courtyard. As usual i need to go over it with some more polish, but it’s another map

Anyway, i’ll be working on more maps as the game surges forwards, so stick around!

Its 3:30 AM in the cold dark night and like any mad indie developer (or mad scientist), instead of sleeping, I’m hard at work on some diabolical creation.

This time, I’m crafting the grotesque creatures that hail from the darker recesses of Rooks Keep.
In Rooks Keep players will get a selection of chess sets to play as.
While our previous set of characters were all a bit cleaner and outfitted with metal suits of armor, these beasts have a different style. Their bulky bodies are bulging with muscle and while some of them use only their natural claws or blades. They all wear minimal armor and what litte equipment they do have is crude and worn.
If you stretch your mind a bit, you might notice that the monsters of Quake 1 lent an inspirational hand to their design.

BE WARNED: What you are about to see includes graphic representation of endevours not entirely finished, one might even call them work-in-progress…

Knight
This friendly customer is going to be the Knight for the beasts side. It will joyfully hack its oppoents with two big sharp implements.

As you can see it doesn’t have textures yet and the materials are not the most fancy. This is the high-detail sculpted mesh with about 8 million polygons. As you can see I’ve been having lots of fun with muscles and trying to get a reasonable skin on him.
We’ll be sure to post some updated shots when SB gets to work on the textures.

Here are some shots showing the early construction of the mesh. Now you can see how I used box modelling and took it from that initial, basic “box chicken” to the snarling beast at the end. I then stuck a piece of armor on top and moved on to the high detail work.



To get it to this stage took about 5 hours.
Here is a shot of the state it was in just before sculpting.

I did the armore and it’s straps in high detail and prepared the rest of the mesh for scuplting by applying smoothing. I also cut some extra loops into the teeth and spike to retain their shape when smoothed.

Ogre / Rook
And then there’s the next one! Right now, I am working on the brutish ogre that will be the Rook on the beasts side!
He’s not done yet. I am in the middle of sculpting my way through the various pieces.


As you can see I’m getting lots of practice on muscles. Its tough, but its getting easier. I think I am getting better at them with each mesh. What makes them even more fun is that there are slight differences on every reference I’ve got.

And for good measure, here are some earlier shots.

That is the LD mesh and the other is the other is the partial HD mesh just before going to sculpting. Notice how the hard ‘mechanic’ style parts have been detailed out while the organic pieces are just smoothed out.

Ok, enough for now. When I’ve finished this little bugger, I’ll fire off arender or two and post those along with some shots of the initial progression.

A great way to start off a blog is with a good, meaty story. Well, how’s this for meaty; Rooks Keep gore!

Chess is a nice clean polite sort of thing, so natrually Rooks Keep, a game mostly about Chess, is brutally violent and completely drenched in blood and viscera.

So thats what I’ve been working on lately. I’m creating a set of decent preliminary gore effects and doing some crazy code shit to get them into the game and appearing in the right ways.
In Rooks Keep, we are using various types of gore effects. We’ve got particle effects, gib meshes, decals on surfaces and material effects on the characters (chess pieces). Each of these works differently, but they all work together to satisfy your gruesome appetites.
One difficulty when working on gore for this game is that there are severl different characters and they all have different weapons and attack styles. The pawn stabs his enemies with a spear, the rook smashes them with a hammer and the knight hacks away with a big old sword. There are also different death styles which every character needs to support such as decapitation, being stabbed and the horrific ‘bursting’.
Another major factor is that there is the possibility of custom chess sets which could have new types of blood. This means all these effects need to be organized and the code has to figure out what effects to play based on how that particular piece got attacked and killed. What we have now is register on each character that holds effects and has to choose the best effect to play based on the attack type. This system is still developing and changing as we add more effects.
With registration and selection sorted out on the code side, we also have to actually create all the effects for these different attack and death styles.

I’ll start with the particles. In Rooks Keep’s gore, their uses include:
-Blood splashes when weapons hit pieces
-Bleeding from injuries
-Blood dripping from weapons
-Slash blood sprays that result from slash weapons such as swords
-Gruesome decapitation sprays
-Gib drip trails
-Horrible explosive bursting

They can even be used for other less obvious effects. When combined with a depth masking technique implemented in the material, they can be used for efficient decals!

Sometimes to achieve some effects, particle systems are manipulated by code to produce dynamic results that fit the situation at that moment.
One example is with slash weapons where we make blood look like it was flicked by the swinging blade. The code determines the direction the weapon is swinging for the attack and then modifies the velocity of the particles to make the blood spray flick off in the same direction the weapon swings.

Well, that’s a start on the gore. Later on, I’ll cover more details and other aspects such as gibs and material effects.
As a matter of interest, do you think all this work necessary? Would you perhaps rather they had wooden swords and just lay down until the end of the match?