Well well, finally I can start posting funny gifs from our project!
I guess many know that feeling where you start from let's say "
Pong" and it turns into "
Digital Volley Simulator VR".
I'm kinda sure this happened to a lot of developers, basically it's fault of bad planning or overestimating resources (time/money/skills),
so yeah, in my case this happened for the game we're still developing now.
We started from a concept we were already familiar, procedural 2D topdown roguelike in pixelart that was made for a flash portal
screen,
and since we got many good reviews even if the game was kinda buggy (it was a port from GBA)
we decided to go keep the formula but make better graphics and switch platform.
So we started making the assets for a pretty similar game but with other nifty gameplay/lore/world features:
And after we were alright with the graphics, we started fleshing out the classes, and the first animations.
knight walk
knight idle
knight attack
We prepared the animations for like 5-6 charcaters, and started fleshing the code for the new procedural dungeon with Unity.
And there started the snowballing...
The second artist of our team kept wondering if [we could translate the characters in
voxels, using softwares like
Qubicle it was super easy,
pretty much a snap of fingers once you get familiar with the tools.
Rigging the characters wasn't much of a trouble either, there were some issues with how joints move but overall
the feeling wasn't bad.
Translating the assets was
a different kettle of fish, the number of triangles that each tile had to draw was massive if we wanted to
keep the voxel/pixel look on the environment,
I absolutely hate when you have simple planes as a surface but there are reasons developers use that.
So we could either make perfectly plain walls and floors and fill the area with various props, or switch to UnrealEgine4 which performed immensely better than Unity and allowed us to have a better look and a faster development pipeline (btw, if any Epic Games developer is reading this: you guys are awesome!) and we also had access to more features that allowed us to speed up the rendering of the game (there was some black magic involved in that so if you want more detail I can ask my programmer)
So yeah, from flash > to unity > to unreal and in quite the short time (around 2-3 months)
And at that pont, nobody "could stop that train", and we kept a very tight schedule of keep designing stuff in 2D and translate them in voxels, clean the geometry on maya and bring everything into Unreal, and we even started messing up with the particles, which are super stressing but also rewarding.
And in quite the short time we managed to flesh out the battle system, environments interaction and the overall feeling of the game, but to tell the truth I wan't fully convinced we could pull all of that until we started using Unreal 4, that really stepped up our game and we managed to go on [greenlight with a
full fleshed trailer (
sorry for the shameless promotion).