video

Due to some (good!) news I can’t announce just yet, my distraction levels lately have been rather huge, so I’m not getting a lot done.

So I thought I’d do another planet making video.

Planetary Planning:

Focus is on the clouds for this planet, so won’t go too crazy with terrain. We are probably aiming to be airborne at least half the time on this planet, so the terrain is a little less of a focus.
Need to make sure the player isn’t going to be ramming higher altitude terrain while inside clouds, so keeping things low/smooth.
Consider what terrain is good for constant, fast, 1-directional movement.
Today mostly tackling a Mars-style, high-speed wind affected terrain using line nodes and noise masks. Check out:

Action! (the video recording software) or my computer shafted me and I lost most of the first take, so here’s a 2nd one, using NVidia ShadowPlay (thanks for the suggestion, Mr @CFantarella).

Flora

I know some frozen rock is unlikely to have much in the way of living flora, but yknow… SPACE! Who knows how these plants live!! Plus, moving grass shows high speed wind nicely.

I checked out some of the fastest moving water/water plants on earth and saw this long flowing and endangered Texas grass:

Also saw a lot of interesting super long seagrass/seaweed, and wondered if I could replicate it somehow. Collisions with long flowing grass probably wouldn’t happen, but at the same time, I’m not sure I care that much. I’d rather the cool looking flowing plants (which probably wouldn’t affect movement anyway) and zero collisions. Indie game dev! Boom! Anyway, this might be a tough ask depending on the scale I go for. I’ll see what I can rustle up.

Things to try:

3D plant models made from Blender. Probably multiple big sheets, to which I add a tiling grass texture, x and y, for rezzz.
2D billboards, but much smaller scale, don’t know if I can even get them to follow the wind direction I want.

Results:

Can’t use grass, it doesnt take wind zones into consideration. It just flaps about aimlessly.
Made a custom tree and messed around with it for an hour or so to get this:

The main problem with this is, we can’t really animate it like flowing grass. So it just kinda sways oddly like a tree. Maybe I need to get my hands on a line renderer type of thing… Unsure I’ll keep this.

Tweaking Terrain

Spend another couple hours making the rivers better, the lighting better (now we can see the ground more easily) and the sky/nebulae a little clearer:

And then back onto the grass again for another hour, and so it went until it was ridiculously late and I got too carried away tweaking things! Looking back at the grass stuff again in that screenshot I think it actually looks alright, hummm. Will see what it looks like to me on Monday morning!

Bye!

Planned Tasks

Continue through Game to Market eBook and ensure I have a well-rounded plan to take to my consultant. 4 hrs
Upload teaser for EXO ONE to Facebook (mostly to see how many views it might generate) 15 mins
Begin Planet 2 terrain (replacing placeholder terrain). Possibly film for Youtube. 3 hrs

PR/Marketing

After going off on wayyy too much of a Kickstarter tangent (though not entirely unrelated to EXO ONE’s marketing), I covered some of the following:

Communication channels (ie Facebook, email, Twitter, etc)
- What to post, when, topic ideas
- Earned vs free coverage options
Kickstarter marketing
Read a crap load of stuff that took ages.
Watched this video:

Which was in this excellent article by IndieWolverine on Kickstarters: http://indiewolverine.com/2016/02/01/video-game-kickstarter-tips/

Planet 2 Terrain

I’m going to try recording a video of this just to see what it’s like, but may not actually share it (will see!).

Here’s some reference for this planet’s terrain:

I’m going to try essentially replacing this water with ice for this cold world. I think long half-pipe like river structures should work well in combination with the fast moving clouds, especially if they mostly somehow orient themselves to match the cloud direction.

River Heightfields

Ok so I spent an hour making a video and it’s not too bad. Pretty slow, and I’m rusty, and mumbly and so on, but that’s what 2x youtube speed is for ya’ll!

Here’s some screens from it, showing the node setup, the resulting heightfield, scene view and in-game. Again, this was only an hour of work, so it has a little way to go still.

Above: River heightmap, created using a simple noise texture, but isolating one small strip of grey value and then applying a curve that turns that grey value strip into a river bed cross section.

Here’s the very simple node network used to create the river, with the cross section I mentioned above.

The heightfield, represented as green for low altitude, red for high (which… is kinda backwards…) :)

The heightfield with a muddy/rocky texture, and snow layered over the top to make it more obvious where the river bed is/isn’t.

Much more lighting and material work required to make the river stand out properly, but here’s a quick in-game screenshot anyways.

The Videoening

Wow, I’m famous, there I am, on Youtubes! Listen to me mumble! And don’t forget to 2x me!!

Cya next time!

Tag: video

Distraction Levels, Huge. More Planet Making.