First WIP pictures!

I'm so excited! O_O Whee!

Okay, first of all, I'm gonna tell you about the game, the visual side of it, to be exact. I'm gonna do all the things you SEE in the game, while Maikki does everything you DO in the game, yay! We are aiming for a handpainted look with our game. Yeah, it's fantasy, but not like it's gonna scream it to your face. We'll be using mostly diffuse and normal maps with our environment, with a few exceptions. Subtle specular maps will be used only for main character, weapons and enemies. I'm going to paint all the textures myself, except for sky textures, which are from cgtextures with a small modifying. I tried to paint them myself first, but then I went "aaargh" and decided to help myself a bit.

We began working on this game about four months ago, just before the internship-stuff started. Since then I have been working on the props for the game pretty much everyday (Almost, I swear!), after the work. That has been pretty much modeling and texturing for four months, this and my internship combined. But I've enjoyed every second of it! My goal is to make ALL the playable zones more or less ready before the schools start next month, so that I can give the project for Maikki to start working on properly. After that, I'll start doing all the other stuff required... Main character has been started, and finishing him will be the first priority next month. I'm so looking forward to animating him...not. After that, I'll turn my attention to enemies, npcs, weapons and all the 2D-stuff required for inventories etc, desingning quests and dialogues... More to follow on all of those, when their time comes! But now... some WIP pictures of the zones! 8) Even Maikki hasn't seen most of these, ever! x)

At the moment we have 15 different zones to play, and I'd say we're gonna have at least 7 more. I've still got a lot of props to make, to eveeerywhere! ^^

Some of the textures, particularly the terrain textures, still need some tweaking, but that's not high on my priority list right now. After the schools start, me and Maikki will have a lot to design. I have been sketching out how the character leveling, progression and skills work, but that's gonna need some heavy testing...and testing. And crying probably. I'd say that's gonna be one of our biggest challenges. As what comes for performance, we are running just fine for now. I've tried to make props share textures as much as possible etc, but much to my disappointment unity indie doesn't do static batching (I'd like that a lot!) and occlusion culling, so we might have to ponder about that problem too in the future.

And for last, meet our dummy, Mr. Pink-eyes the T-pose. For now, he's doing the job of our main character, doomed forever to kill the same creature over and over again, to test our battle system. Well, not for forever. He's gonna retire to be an npc when the real main character takes his place 8)

Cheers!

First Words

Okay, let's get it started! This is a blog about our final project, the ending climax of our three years of studies in Sataedu vocational school. Who are we? Well, we are Dual Pistol, a game developing team made from two differently gifted individuals: Me, Mikko Lasonen and my classmate Henna Leppänen. We noticed our different skills during our studies and decided to make our final school project together, so we could both do what we know best and are good at. We decided to go with the Dual Pistol team name, because obviosly there is two of us, Dual Pistol sounds pretty cool and Henna came up with this excellent logo where the pistols form two letters "L", which comes from our last names. Our game is still unnamed, but it is a RPG-game made with Unity Game Engine. We have already started making the game and have put several hours in many areas of developement. The final scale of the project will be determined by how much we will have ready for spring 2013, when we are supposed to return it to our teachers. Henna will be doing all the art, images, 3D-models, animation and other artwork, but she will be telling more later herself. My work will be in making the game do different things when the player interacts with our game world. This will happen by me writing thousands of lines of codes in Javascript, making links between different game objects and starting the game several hundreds, maybe thousands of times to test my code. Sounds very interesting doesn't it? Well, that's what I love to do! I will also be responsible of the sounds and music in the game, hopefully I will make most of them myself, we'll see. I'll add more stuff later, I think that this is more than enough words for the first blog text. Thanks for reading!