jodygallagher

This was origionaly posted at Lostzombies.co.uk our main website.

Example of the Robot race

Hey folks! Jody here with a little update on the progress of ‘Away Team’ and a look into the methods we use for producing a large volume the game’s assets.

First off, the game is coming along nicely, we are fast approaching an alpha release so keep your eyes peeled for future updates.

Secondly, at this stage of development, a major concern for us has been improving on the look of the game while keeping the amount of required assets manageable this is something we have been putting a lot of thought into recently as we inch closer to release.

One of the more time consuming task for a small team like ours is generating content. Creating a great game is important and one aspect we don’t want to skimp on is the overall aesthetic feel. This means a ton of custom models, great textures and lots of variety, amongst other things…

A few examples of random characters currently available in game.

One area of the game that requires a lot of assets is the character customisation. While the player cannot directly alter the look of their team, we wanted to give each member their own individual look and feel and make the little guys and gals stand out on there own. This means different looking models for class, gender, race and also held equipment. In order to achieve this and to cut down on the number of needed assets we devised a system using one base mesh per gender this then has its texture swapped out to represent different characters, changing the face, clothes etc. On top of this we have attachment points connected to the head, hands, shoulders and other important parts of the body that we can swap in and out models to represent things like new hair cuts and body armour.

Along with this mesh customisation we have some quite complex material shaders that allow us to use gray-scale textures with masks and re-colour different parts inside our engine. This means hair colour, clothing, weapons and equipment can all be coloured and customised for each character and their class or race.

All the customisation is handled in game, when you generate a new character, the game will choose a name, look, colour scheme and other stats for the character, meaning we can have an almost limitless number of characters with different looks and characteristics from a limited amount of assets. We plan to increase the number of customisable parts over time giving huge amounts of variation to the little away team members.

There is also a colour value in there that’s masked off for the different parts.

Here is a rough breakdown of how the material shaders work in game to generate the final textures. You will also notice the progression from our first implemented characters (which were quite flat and boring) through to our current models, which look much nicer. These models are probably no more than about an inch and a half on screen during current game-play.

Hope that was interesting to at least one or two folks and if it was let us know and Ill put up some similar posts in the future. Maybe environments next…

Thanks!