Apologies for the lack of updates. Took the weekend off, and then it was Wednesday!
Been working on SOTD and Metropolis.
You know those old film sets where they just show the front of the building and there’s nothing else there?
Well Metropolis was like that. If we look at the screenshots I’ve been using from a different angle you can see we’re missing things like roofs. And basically anything beyond the front of the building.
There are two types of assets you need in a game, specific assets for things like landmarks (like the Milly’s Diner set) and then generic buildings that fill in the other 80% of the above, below and depth of the city. So I made a Blueprint that allows me to define buildings. Basically you select ground floor fronts, corners, sidewalks, and then floor sides and corners, and then a roof, and it will make the actual asset to the size x,y,z you want and adorn it with all the ads and junk you expect to see. Hopefully I’ll have some results tomorrow. I’ve found that the most important aspect to the building is the ground floor, most store assets have closed doors and shuttered shops, but in a real city you actually want there to be signs of life and so that requires much more depth in the ground floor than most of these assets offer. Lots of sign work in After Effects.
SOTD work has been going through the slide deck and writing up the asset list. This is another case of needing to build the entire environment since we basically go all over the town (in the full experience). I actually dreamt last night of recreating the SOTD environment over and over in the plains of Africa, the harbor of Hong Kong and the jungle of the Amazon as the story of the Ankou plays out over and over all over the world with the same motions but just different locations.
I’m on a panel in Singapore in about an hour and a half. I guess one of the upsides of the lockdown is that I am doing that from the comfort of my own home.
Graeme.