This looks like way less progress than it is!

I'm not even going to bother posting a picture, because it is exactly the same, but scroll down to that post where I was like "Oh hey, I made an ugly prototype in Unity".  But except this time, I made the ugly prototype in unity that MAKES ITSELF when you click a button, then you can click a different button to change the grid to orange.  This seems less exciting, except it means that I figured out how to affect every square on that stupid grid individually (I know they look like stripes, but they're actually a grid of very thin 1x1 cubes) through scripting.  Which means I'm only one step away from being able to say "put a bear on this square and an archer on this square" but that's actually like a thousand steps because I need to model an archer and a bear.  But I'm like one step away from "put a cube on this square and a capsule on this square" and two steps away from "and as soon as it starts, all cubes move forward and attack anything they hit, and all capsules spawn smaller capsules that travel forward quickly in a straight line until they hit the cube".  Well, you know...

I'm posting more pictures of blender progress because it is way more obvious than Unity progress.  I have a walk cycle done.  Like all other things I "finish" it is a super crappy walk cycle, but it is way more useful to have a crappy model with crappy textures and a crappy walk cycle than a really pretty eyeball.

Your Gender can be Wicker or Leather

Is my prototype character customization screen super progressive or did I just not get around to making all the necessary assets yet?

THE WORLD WILL NEVER KNOW.

Blender is my mortal enemy...

... Tonight we do battle.

Animation is SO CREEPY.

But I have actually been doing a lot of thinking about my actual game while I arduously paint over crap in weight painting mode, and I realized I've never actually said what it is.

The basic idea is that the game is going to be a lane-style tower defense game in 3D, combined with a Civ-style kingdom building game in a partially procedural generated world.  You're on a map that's a grid.  You can attack any of the squares on any side, and they can attack you, and battle is done in Plants-vs-Zombies style lane defense puzzles.  And you build your troops and fortifications with resources your kingdom gathers, and those troops and fortifications hang around after battle.  So you have to lay out your stuff in a way that you're defended from attackers, but you're not using all your precious farm and lumbermill space to build walls and catapults.  An easy-to-pick-up, difficult-to-master resource management, real time strategy game with rogue-light sensibilities, all wrapped up in Farmville paper.  Well, construction paper.

Part of me thinks that this will be the best game ever that will revolutionize casual games forever, and part of me thinks that I will make this game only to find I'm the only one who could even vaguely enjoy something like this.  Most likely, I'll just run out of steam when I no longer feel like I want to do what amounts to two 40 hour jobs a week, and I'll give away/sell all the assets on the internet.  But for now I'm enjoying myself, shut up.

Rigging is hard.

It is!

But I think I'm almost done.

Oh yeah, finished the texture.  It still needs a lot of reworking, but totes not reworking time.

I have way too much to do to ever sleep.

Well, I'm about to turn in for the night.  Progress for the day:

Some pretty sweet-looking leggings, some awful-looking metal that doesn't look at all like aluminum foil, and a tutorial changing room that lets you swap out weapons and character meshes.

Complete with man lanterns!

Good morning!

I was up until 2, then up again at 6, but I think I'm getting better at this whole UV unwrapping thing.  It didn't take me 6 hours just to unwrap the shirt, so I'll call that progress.

The hair, boots and belt are all just messing around with throwing a really basic paper texture on an object.  But I really like the shirt, where I took my time and shaded it and drew on some creases.

The belt and shoes look totally crappy, but I'm not going to rework them until later in the process.  It'll do for now.  Refining is for when you have a product to refine.

I have a prototype in unity.  Looks so good right?  I'm also going through the BurgZerg Hack and Slash tutorials to go through that process of making and refining a game (plus I'm totally cobbling parts of this in shamelessly.) and that one has floating man-lanterns because I was too lazy to hunt through the internet to find a free lamp mesh to steal to make timed lighting.

And I made a skybox that looks like paper.  I need to smooth out the edges, but hey, that's my rule.  Get everything working before you start refining.

It Begins

If there's anything I know about myself, it's that I'm more accountable if I have a place to brag, even if there's no one to brag to.  And I really want to brag about this, so I'm going to brag to the ether.

I'm making the game that I've always wanted to play, and it's going to be awesome.  I don't want to spend more time writing about what I'm doing than actually doing it, so I'm just going to post my progress and fill in the blanks later.

I'm learning Blender to make all my game models (or most of them.  I'll probably end up buying some generic stuff as it gets closer to crunch time.  Since I enjoy the basic form more than the fine-tuning, which results in everybody looking like they're made of folded paper, I think I've decided that the art style of this game will be "made out of folded paper".  It's totally intentional, I swear.

Welp, back to coding and blending.