August Update

By Salireths.

Hello, dear Patrons!

It's not a huge update this time, but I'm doing the best I can to squeeze work in the little time I have between some potentially life-altering changes, both happening right now and coming up very soon.

I'm not going to cover all of these changes here, as some of them are personal, however even without that I have plenty to talk about:

Dragon Model

First up, I started working on the new Dragon creature everyone voted for! I refitted some of the old work and used it as a base jumping-off point. It is currently just a mockup, I was focusing on getting the stylized anatomy and proportions right, its always worth to spend extra time to create a good basemesh in the long run!

I took both Strong and Robust concept variants as a base, and managed to do something in-between.

It will be customizable in-game what sort of bodyshape you prefer over the other with a slider.

Additionally I plan on including the replacements for head and neck inspired by the Long variant, so ideally we'll be getting three variants in one.

The dragon looks muscular now because it's an anatomy sketch. Once I start sculpting I will be making two separate variants, one with more muscle, other… more round. The player will then be able to choose which variant they prefer more during customization.

Virtual Reality

Another news is that I got my first VR headset (Quest 2). I've been getting used to it and heavily modding it so it is actually comfortable to use for prolonged amounts of time.

The experience I've been having is quite "eye-opening", and despite trying out a couple games, I found it's most amazing application is creative and social.

Creative VR

For creative side, I've been getting into Adobe Medium, Open Brush (free fork of Tilt Brush) and Gravity Sketch.

In the latter I was able to make something in two hours that that would normally take me two days, something I was always afraid to tackle - fur. The kind of fur that is made out of transparent textured cards that are glued to the model.

Not the most ground-breaking tech, however models this fur will work everywhere, not just inside our game. And getting that part right is important for us because we are giving an ability for players to export their 3D character models out of the game after customizing them.

You can see the demon-dog attached image, it’s a on old model I still need to finish up and give it to the owner, but I'd say his new fur looks pretty good! I'm going to keep doing my experiments with painting in 3D.

Also, the sculpting process in VR is especially empowering because you have the freedom in 3-dimensional space, not on a flat 2D tablet. I plan on using Adobe Medium for my future creature sculpts.

I'm pretty slow in it at the moment, but with some more practice I should be able to improve my sculpting speed significantly over what I previously had in Blender and Zbrush. There is simply more raw creativity in Medium, less worrying about what buttons to push.

Social VR

And for the social side, I've been getting into NeosVR lately, and I've ported one of my character models (the Kobold) into it, done quite some work to overhaul the model (made him even cuter!) and update the textures. The kobold avatar will also be available for VRChat as well!

I'm planning to make it free for long-supporting patrons for a limited time, and after it will be available through itch.io.

Originally that model was made for Second Life, and was received very well there!

I plan on selling avatars and producing more content for VR platforms in the near future, potentially to have an additional income source to sustain our work on our big game.

Returning to YouTube

I've also been working on resuming making videos again.

I wrote the script that recaps all our development, discussing the long road of our game's development and future plans.

I also have a neat idea how I can film that video using VR, but I actually need to find time to do it, so stay tuned - it should be fun!

Conclusion

A lot of new and interesting things have just opened up for me, and I hope I will be able to bring the benefits of having new tools to everyone through my work.

It might take time until I figure out what exactly I can build with these new possibilities, but I'm already swimming in a sea of ideas!

With lots of Dragon Love,
Salireths.

PS: Just for people who might be wondering, we are not working to make our game have VR support, simply because the core design and all the graphics we've done for it so far are not compatible with VR.
However that doesn't mean we shouldn't use the benefits of VR tools to develop certain things more efficiently and with more fun!