Guessmyname

Mwahahaha, I had no idea there was a blog thingie here. Don't worry, I'll probably forget to update it soon enough. For now, I'll use it to post developments on the little mech game I'm working on for Spring (can't/don't want to give out info on the other projects I'm involved in, as they're not mine).

(Warning, large words approaching)

For kickers, I've got team-coloured camouflage working; for those not knowing, the team colour in Spring is overlaid on the existing unit's texture and is one flat colour, with a mask preventing it from covering over everything.

Thus, to make a camo pattern, I have an underlaying greyscale camo pattern the teamcolour goes over, which is also factored into said teamcolour's mask; thus, where the camo is dark, little tc shows through, where it is light, most tc shows through. Then, because I did everything else on separate layers, I layer-select all of those, and remove them from the mask too so that they aren't covered over. And because that above paragraph even confused me when I tried to read it, here's a million-word picture:

Snazzy pic? Snazzy pic. Why did we ever evolve from cave paintings? Oh, and go Right Click > View Image to see it in full

There's also some other stuff to that texture (namely, self illumination and reflections), but still. TA DA. *cues applause*

Where was I? Ah, yeah. Design doc is roughly complete-ish; most of the mech specs aren't set in stone beyond 'this one is for doing this with' and 'this one can do that sometimes under a full moon' etc; final balance and stat tweakery will come with time, obviously. The mechanics are down, though I'm still far from understanding fully how to implement them.

On the Art front, I have four modelled mechs, one mech being jockied around in the concepting stage due to the paradox of trying to make a stealth mech both distinctive and... well, hard to see, and two of said modelled mechs being textured / mostly textured (Atreides could do with a bit more snazz and pre-shading and the Grasshopper's feet are still WIP) with a third about to start production soon, once I've UV mapped it. Whee, that was a long sentence.

Scripting wise, I'm still lua-ing up the Atreides and trying to get it to the point where I can toy with it ingame, even if it has no animations. At which point, I will start the animations. Fun times. Somehow, I suspect Notepad++ is going to soon become either my greatest friend or worst enemy. Eh, probably both. Pretty sure the hardest part of making this game is going to be a toss-up between animating the mechs and scripting them correctly. Still, lua > bos any day.

Things are going well, though the other projects I work on do command quite a lot of my time as too despite the fact I can't talk about them, and I still haven't gotten around to learning to animate in 3ds Max yet. Considering I shuffled out money for those Noesis tutorials, I really should watch them sometime.