hobbyist game dev
One of my earlier posts included a campfire, among other light source models.
After importing them into Godot I took advantage of the built in 3D particle emitter and some lighting nodes.
With a little bit of effort and some messing about with the particle emitter, I got some very basic looking fire that will work well for my use case. Below are a small video of the campfire and a torch.
Originally I was going to have doors between the rooms, but I ended up going with this portal like effect, but all the code references still call them ‘Doors’ hence the odd post title.
Essentially when you enter a floor of the tower, the game will randomly generate a bunch of rooms connected by these portals, which the player must clear of enemies before they can ascend to the next floor.
I ended up using the skulls I sculpted in an earlier post to create some dark portals that players will use to move between rooms inside the tower. I’m currently messing with shaders to get a cool portal / dark effect when the portal is active and you can kind of see that above. I’m still tinkering with shaders and the door effect and will be posting more about it in the future.
Tried my hand at doing sculpting with Blender. I figured I’d try making a skull for some more creepy areas in the game.
Up until now, I’d been manipulating vertices, edges, and faces manually in Blender to create my models. Doing it this way meant the models I created did not contain many polygons, thus the name ‘low poly’ models.
Sculpting on the other hand is essentially giving broad instructions to areas of the model. So you can select an area and push it inwards and it will make a small dent on the model. Essentially like real sculpting, hence the name. This requires models that contain a bunch of vertices to manipulate.
I created the skull below using a reference image, a sphere packed with a lot of vertices and a bunch of mistakes.
Now I want to use this in my games, but it doesn’t really fit too well with all of my other low poly models. So I used a decimate modifier on the model to bring down the poly count in an attempt to bring it into the style of my existing models.
You can easily make out the individual faces of the skull now, giving it a more low poly look. It still has a lot more polygons than any of my other models, but it does fit a little better compared to before if I do say so myself.
After I tweaked it a bit with the decimate modifier, I decided to add little horns and put the skull on a spike.
Sculpting seems pretty useful, but I think I’d need to take advantage of a tablet and pen to do it properly since all the tools are pressure sensitive. I did the above with mouse and keyboard but it takes a lot of adjusting of the pressure setting on the tools instead of just adjusting the pressure of the pen physically.
Maybe I’ll give it a shot with my tablet and see how it goes and post about it in the future.
Just a small little post showing a loot bag I made for item drops in Trivo.
These will be used to hold items, which will drop from slain enemies.
The player will be able to interact with these bags and a window will appear showing the items contained in the bag and the option transfer the contents to their own inventory.
I’m hoping to be able to post pictures of the in-game looting window soon, but I’m currently re-working sections of the in-game user interface. When that’s done I’ll post more about it with pictures.
When I started to work on Trivo, I decided I should probably learn how to do simple 3D models so I could at least learn the general workflow from 3D model creation to being loaded up as a game asset. Even if I didn’t end up making assets that were cut up for production, I figured it’d be valuable experience.
A very low polygon campfire
I eventually started to learn how to do low polygon 3D models in Blender (with the help of Youtube videos), and I must say, I very much enjoy creating 3D models with Blender. It feels pretty good being able to create a 3D model that you can then use in a game, even if it may be just a placeholder asset.
Some sort of metal chandelier with candles
As you can tell from the title, the models I made here give off some source of ‘light’. I was messing with the lighting system in Godot and needed some assets to light up the scene, so I took some time to create these simple models and created scenes of them and a light source to use for Trivo.
A wall torch sconce
I’ve started recently to learn how to do sculpting of 3D models with Blender, but I’m not sure if I’ll end up using it much for my current needs. Low polygon models seem to fit my use case quite well for the moment.