Multiplayer, World Creator, Artstyle

Author: Salireths

We're very grateful to everyone supporting the development of TGOR!

This month's focus has been on bringing the features to a more polished and playable level, as well as enabling them to work in multiplayer. Inventory, weapons, character customization (and other features) work with multiple clients.

Sadly we didn't prepare anything special for Halloween, because the work on the game is our priority.

Most systems we wanted to put into the next build are almost ready. Our next focus is creating gameplay content for people to experience these systems.

And as you know from previous posts, I have been experimenting with level design a lot: from open world, to small metroidvania-style levels. By trying different approaches it helped me understand what our game needs, and what we can produce as a tiny team of two people.

The world that was destined to be

The world where player starts is called Interspace. It is a small hub-level where player get access to the Gateway and facilities to customize appearance and loadout. The hub went through many iterations before we settled on an extremely minimalistic variant (mainly due to the technical requirement for the level to be always loaded)

LORE:
Interspace is a special dimension outside the constraints of time and space.
Life is suspended here: while creatures can't grow old, take damage, don't need to eat, they unfortunaly can't also feel, experience and learn anything. To do that they visit physical realities.
Gatekeepers use this place to gear up, change their body, and prepare for the journeys ahead.

I've decided to leave the mandatory tutorial level out - exploring a Reality of player's choice and learning things along the way seems like a much better fit for our game.

To start creating these Realities we need to carefully consider their size, content richness, and workload to make them. To assist in creating big worlds with less time required here are the steps we're taking:

World Creator

I have recently invested in getting World Creator - this program already helped me sculpt worlds with much greater freedom than I ever had before, all thanks to your support!

► Full video and more screenshots are in this Imgur post ◄

With precise control, it can create various mountain ridges, canyons, dunes, and it can simulate absolutely beautiful erosion. It's much better than World Machine in flexibility and allowing me to work in real-time.

World Creator is also useful to colorize and assign texture layers to the the landscape (though textures aren't applied yet). By the way, Hopfel is making a tool that is capable of extracting colors from the map and putting them into special color-palette gradients for our game shaders to use. He's using some kind of machine learning algorithm magic for that, and its awesome!

Assets and distribution

Just having a landscape alone is not enough - we will need to build some algorithms to help us decorate levels further. Instead of doing manual labor all days long, we can write an algorithm that will procedurally, realistically, and artistically distribute trees, rocks, cliffs, plants, and similar objects. Unreal Engine 4 comes with such an algorithm already, however we might need to expand more on it eventually.

Speaking of trees and rocks, I've recently been re-working those a bit. The goal was to develop a new style and workflow which would be more creative, wouldn't require concept art, and most importantly, would be very quick - usable assets need to be made from ground up in the matter of one or two hours.

Rocks are now modelled using a bunch of n-gons, actually something 3D artists usually advice to avoid. However thanks to clever usage of Blender modifiers and normal smoothing, I can quickly turn boxes into interestingly shaped rocks, plus I get the benefit of using that box later as a collision volume! What I'm showing on screenshots is not yet final, they won't have that uniform-color look, rocks are going to have a texture that will increase their details. By the way, this style was inspired by Polybox' work, but all assets are our own.

Using Blender 2.8 I have found a cool way to just draw branches and leaves in 3D-space, similar to how Tilt Brush works (though I don't have a VR headset). It is actually very fun to do, like playing some building game!

Of course, the downside is that the plants turn out somewhat simple and "flat" like paper. But who said low poly style is bad? There are entire games done such style.

That's just my artistic vision

To make the style more coherent I adjusted our textures to reflect the angularness and lowpoly-ness in them. I also decided to stop worrying about UV seams, as those take too much time and resources to fix. I actually purposefully introduced some cuts and inconsistencies into the textures, making seams be part of the style.

I have also optimized the tree crowns, reducing overdraw area and number of triangles (from 350 to 75) and draw calls. Crowns are now made out of a simple triangle clumps with semi-transparent leaf textures.

There was never a goal to make nature super-realistic, instead what I wanted is to "suggest" it with big "brush" strokes.

After all, there is enough games with pretty trees, what we don't have enough is games where we can play as pretty scaly creatures. Point is, with me working alone on all art, we have to prioritize certain things, and I'd much rather put more time into characters!

Gameplay and content

While a bit out of scope for this post, let's quickly mention what is needed as a next step.

After the world is populated with some "natural beauty", it will need to have gameplay content for players to explore. Procedural placement can only get you so far, but to make sure levels are interesting, we have to hand-place certain points of interest around.

There is a conundrum though: we need to produce enough quantity of those places while we lack the brute level-designer workforce to do it. We have some interesting ideas on how to tackle that issue, but that's a story for another day! And a big one.

For now we're just planning to put enough content to show off the systems we built, and keep expanding with future, hopefully, more frequent content-updates.

That's all for this post! Thank you for reading!

Stay tuned for the part two where I will show you some new concept-art and explain some key points about the lore!