It all started when I was sorting out the importing of the models for our collaboration project. When importing the knight model and setting up the lighting, I noticed that I had accidentally fallen in love with the low-poly untextured style. Well, that's not true, I've played games with that style before and loved them plenty (Note: Grow Home) but this was the first time that I'd fell in love with my variation on that style. And by that, I mean that I felt that my works looked cool and not ameture for once. Looking at what I'd made, I thought about what I could do with this style, and then it dawned on me. This was the missing piece of my idea, the visual styling that would allow the mechanics to fit perfectly alongside it, keeping the game optimised and looking beautiful at the same time.
Basic premise: you play as a badass in the truest sense; a deadly assassin, enhanced with extraordinary abilities allowing him to kill with ruthless efficiency. Using a otherworldly sniper rifle, she/he is able to eliminate roomfuls of enemies in under a second, moving too quickly for even the most specially trained of bodyguards to be able to comprehend. Dodging bullets at 2,500mph is trivial, for the most part. But, some of these things just don't look as nice in Unity as I'd like them to, so I've got an upgrade.
Unity 5.5.0b4! Numbers! This is the beta version of the latest unity update: Unity 5.5, which comes packed with new features apparently. All I see that's new in the patch notes is the new trail renderers, particle effect changes and splash screens. but, that doesn't matter, because we'll be using pretty much all of those new features! specifically the newer particle effects, but the splash screens are nice too. I'll slap that giant ass 8-bit logo on there and it'll look nicer on Steam. Oh, I forgot to mention, this will hopefully be on Steam Greenlight eventually, but don't get your hopes up! It'll get drowned out by all the mobile ports and RPG-Maker games. I'm passing the time during the install playing a half an hour long Audiosurf ride. Yay for film scores. Today's ride is Batman V Superman, cause the film sucked ass but the soundtrack was bomb.
Additionally, I began some designs on the sniper rifle. I'm aiming (heh) for a more human-alien look for this, so I want it to be quite square and boxy while still having unfamiliar shapes and hovering bits. For the most part, my initial concept sketches are a little clunkier then I'd like, and it looks more like an assault rifle of some kind. But, with the magic of blender modelling, this shouldn't be an issue. Also, I'm aware that most concept artists use graphics tablets to draw their concept art, and have a full colour rendition from multiple angles, but I got a D in my art qualifications so I have an excuse. Mainly, it doesn't need to be so detailed due to the styling of the game, and the fact that concept art is generally to convey an idea to the development team, but I'm the development team AND the concept artist, so I know what I mean when my drawings look like asscheese.
The rifle and scope are designed separately partly because they're meant to be separate, but mostly because I ran out of space at the top of the page. The red arrows indicate where it'll be placed on the rifle. It'll hover over it, to give it a bit more of an alien look, and the centre small core-like piece will rotate, either with each shot or constantly, we'll see how it pans out.there will be about 2-3 materials on this whole thing, mainly metallic greys and silvers of varying reflective. I'm tempted to use reflection probes so that the rifle reflects the scene, but i think that's a little too much pushing the style. I'm already pushing the whole 'low poly' idea with the amount of detail on it, so we'll see how it pans out.
During modelling the rifle, Dan asked how things were going and I thought i'd take a screenshot to show him. I use Lightshot, which has a pen tool built in so I could draw in the rest of the rifle. But this prompted a problem. A big problem. a big big BIG problem. See those mall circle-ish shapes at the back? that's the handle, and the bulging down lump in front of it is the other hand hold. Notice how it's not even half way. The average arm span for people is 5 feet and 9 inches. After a bit of maths so inaccurate and guess-y it would make Pythagoras have a stroke, it's looking to be about 12 feet-ish. That's an entire Fiat 500's worth of sniper rifle. Hell yeah. Nothing inspires fear more then a gun the size of a small city hatchback.
Image photo credit to Fiat
So, here we have the finished sniper rifle. It's huge. And beautiful. And awesome. And huge. Did I mention it was awesome? I didn't scale it down, it'll be on the player's HUD anyway so scale won't really matter, just the third person model will look weird, but it's not multiplayer so that doesn't even matter! It looks alien, mysterious, futuristic and kick-ass. the scope floats, but may have a little bobbing animation while idle, and the centre core-piece is now part of the firing chamber. It'll probably spin up when it fires or something. I don't care, it just looks cool. If anyone wonders how it works, I'll claim space stuff. You may notice that the hand-holds aren't there, and there's no room for the trigger or anything. That's cause it's so god damn huge that to get it on the screen that part wouldn't be visible anyway, so it's only wasted performance. besides, it's alien, you could fire it by tickling it for all you know.
Anyway, that's all there is for now, so keep your eyes open for more things on this project and the collaboration one. I don't know how to separate the two verbally (or..wordily?) so we'll call this project Time Warp. Not like the song, though if I could get the rights I'd have that as the sound track. The name has relevance, but since I didn't unveil much on mechanics it doesn't make sense to readers. Oh well. You'll get it one day. Oh, and this blog is on Bloglovin now, as per my girlfriend Lois's recommendation. She's awesome so I'm sure the website is cool, as far as I know it'll keep you updated and give you notifications and such on my posts, so you'll never miss another flag physics milestone again.
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