I've been working away at the intro section, Collie's Psychepelago. I made a list of things I need to do for this:
- A model for one kind of monster - or figmon - which you can have a few battles against
- A revised skin for Savitr that looks like a silly JRPG protagonist
- A finalised layout for the area
- An initial dialogue scene that takes you from the title screen into a new game
- Additional dialogue scenes as you progress through the dungeon
- A revised battle background arena model
- Music, which will probably have at least four parts: intro dialogue, Preyloot encounter, exploring and battling, and a final battle against The Beast
I hoped to do them all this week, but that turned out to be a naive estimation. This is why the whole development process takes so long; things seem doable, but once they're actually approached, they eat up much more time than expected.
I did the first two things, mostly! Last week, I included this concept art from the very start of Divine Dreams' development and 2020:
And this recent revision of the concept:
Here's the model that I made from that:
I'm really happy with it! I feel I'm getting a lot more confident at 3D modelling creatures in general. For whatever reason, I hate texture painting, and I feel so reluctant to start on it... but I pushed through it and I'm really pleased with the result here. It's subtle, but adds a lot.
This monster - literally called Monster originally - appeared in both MARDEK and Taming Dreams. I think - though I can't remember perfectly - that when I was a child, I drew some 'bestiary' things in Paint or something, with a few bland, childish, or bizarre monster species for some imagined RPG. I don't remember most of them, and sadly I no longer have the files. I know one was 'I-Orb', a floating eye that made it into some other projects and MARDEK, there was a boring and surely-poorly-drawn 'Jade Dragon', and I think one was this weird two-armed-no-legged purple monster with a garish neon green mohawk or crest. I included it in MARDEK in the children's imagination since it had literally come from my own childish imagination.
I reused it in Taming Dreams as that was a direct reimagining of MARDEK, though I made it more ghostly to reflect the mental nature of the monsters. This new design - which I've called Monstrife since just Monster was too bland - is similar, though it's been made more beastly to work as a representation of Collie's fear of being a 'violent beast'. Plus it's Destruction so it has a lighting bolt ghost tail, which I like a lot!
I also gave it the five basic animations that monsters need in this game - idle, hit, die, attack, run (for switching sides when tamed or lost) - which took time, then actually adding it as a working monster in the game took time too. Here it is using an attack.
In total, I'd say it took maybe a day and a half, starting from complete scratch (though I suppose I had the concept already so I didn't need to spend time coming up with that).
The creator says she spent 60 hours over 8 weeks on that model, which I'd say isn't all that much more complicated than this one I made. But that's a huge time difference!
She also described the texture painting as 'the fun part' and the skinning as the most tedious, whereas I hate texture painting and my own approach to skinning is really quick and painless.
So it's interesting how much subjective variation there is with this. Though I suppose it's like visual art; I can rarely be bothered spending more than about an hour on a drawing, but other artists see them as huge projects they devote days to... which gives them way better results in the end than I can manage. Oh well; I suppose I devote my time rather madly to these exhausting months-long projects instead!
I also adapted this concept art from... 3 weeks ago?? (That long??):
Into this skin for Savitr's existing model (and as such it didn't need new animations):
I've not yet developed enough of the intro to start playing around with it in-game yet, though.
The hair was a pain, but satisfying to finish. I had to swap the pauldron to the other side because it was overlapping with the resonar. Hopefully it'll read as a silly JRPG protagonist in game... though the wings - a carry-over from the previous concept - might interfere with that? We'll see!
I also spent at least a day just trying to figure out some technical stuff to get an intro scene working... but hopefully I'll have that in a more working state by next week and can talk about it then.
Some other personal/mental illness/money woes stuff has come up this week that I've been meaning to write a blog post about, but I've been struggling to do so because of the very issues I want to write about. Annoying! Maybe I'll get to it at some point... I've been mentioning these posts on Twitter when they're done (I also mentioned the other things on Twitter over the course of the week so you might have seen them already if you follow me on there), but I feel weird tweeting about personal venting posts, so I probably won't if I do post it here.
I meant to start playing a new game this week, ideally an indie, maybe that Omno thing I mentioned recently... but I didn't! Just starting a new game seems to be the hardest part, and I usually just end up getting distracted doing other stuff or procrastinating... Stupid that something that's supposed to be entertainment can feel like such a chore to start!
...And I completely forgot about the Lore page! Whoops.
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