Untitled Project

[ZenVirZan]

If anyone has been following my projects, they'd know I'm awful at naming things. If anyone has an idea of a name for this project, please let me know :thumb:

This is a development thread for a online multiplayer battle arena that I'm working on.
Because I need to create all assets myself, I've created this thread as a development log. It's gunna be low-poly, but at least the style will be consistent.

I plan for this game to be a third-person shooter, where the player can choose their two weapons (one melee, one ranged) and their armour items (because we're fighting with mechs, you can swap out pieces of armour with ease). Each character will have a selectable Active and Passive skill available for use in game.
A majority of this game will me mechanically focused on the melee combat and freedom of movement with the dashing system. If anyone has played a GunZ game, they'll know what I mean.

It will include the regular Team Deathmatch and Elimination game modes, as well as a Capture The Flag.

It's worth noting that I have never made a 3D game before, so this will be my first one. Biting off a lot more than I can chew, most likely.
But I'm motivated.

This post will be updated as more progress is made, especially with in-game screenshots and a logo at some point.
this shit is what happens when a dev watches evangelion and thinks 'fuck thats cool'

 

[ZenVirZan]

Reserved post for a to-do list.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Some stuff I made a few days ago to today. Nothing here is textured, they're just object colours.
It's also worth keeping in mind that the blades of the melee weapons will have neon edges.

Spoiler: Rifle

Heavily based off of the XM8

Spoiler: Shotgun

Roughly based off of the Benelli M4

Spoiler: Katana

tank chopper!!!!!! /s

Spoiler: Greatsword

I'm not very happy with this one, I'll probably re-make it before it even gets a texture

 

[ZenVirZan]

I re-made the greatsword - Much happier with it now.

Spoiler: Greatsword

Inspiration definitely not from Riven's blade.

EDIT: Also made an smg really quick. I'm busy procrastinating - I have to do the armour next. The hardest part :\

Spoiler: SMG

mp7 is an mp7

 

[ZenVirZan]

Well I guess I'm getting somewhere, but I haven't written a single line of code yet.
It's really interesting how once my head hurts from modelling stuff, I go model a weapon then swap back to what I was doing, or try to churn an animation out instead. It never ends.

Spoiler: Screenie

Also, some progress I guess

 

[Ellie]

Good luck with 3D. I used it a bit at Uni but that was within Unreal Engine, so a little different to starting from scratch. I know it can be fruitful but also incredibly frustrating at times, but it's something we don't see very often here, so should be very interesting to follow.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Thanks yo
I'm using Unity for now, so fortunately that's all super easy for me, not quite scratch. I was trying to use opengl for a project a few weeks ago but I really can't be bothered with it at this point. Perhaps when I feel like making an engine rather than a game, I might get around to it.

Also, I equipped my only armour and a katana.

Spoiler

I haven't rigged the fingers properly so w/e

now I can finally get to learning how to script in unity woo

 

[ZenVirZan]

procrastinating doing anything useful
i textured the katana and greatsword

Spoiler: new stuff

because of the minimalist look im going for, the guns look really average. im not sure how i should texture it to match the rest of the game.

Spoiler: average stuff

i also made another melee weapon

Spoiler: the straightblade

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Looks good. How are you splitting your time between programming and creating assets?

If you're going to do every lowpoly, I might recommend giving the items very shiny surfaces, with bright contrasting colors. I'm just imagining your stuff with a Portal color scheme, and I think it would work well.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Yeah, I was aiming for a Portal / Mirror's edge style.
So far I've just been making assets, because I hit a roadblock with the code that I'm still gathering the motivation to work through.
Working in 3D is very different to 2D - So much is out of your hands. With Unity, anyway.

 

[Xilef]

Yeah, I was aiming for a Portal / Mirror's edge style.
So far I've just been making assets, because I hit a roadblock with the code that I'm still gathering the motivation to work through.
Working in 3D is very different to 2D - So much is out of your hands. With Unity, anyway.

What's the roadblock? Unity projects are infamous for ending up with an incredibly flat UML tree when inspecting the class inheritance - it could be that you can tackle the problem by making smaller objects that churn through part of the task. Unity's scripting interface seems to subtly nurture coders to avoid breaking down tasks into their components (and thus, poor code reuse).

3D is very different, the learning curve is greater, however once you master it the content production pipeline is way, way more efficient than 2D as 3D models and animations can be reused and the lighting-model is (traditionally) shared across objects in the world - with 2D it's a new sprite for every entity that interacts with every new feature and lighting can be rigid (but 3D practices have made their way back to 2D with projects like sprite-lamp).

 

[ZenVirZan]

3D is very different, the learning curve is greater, however once you master it the content production pipeline is way, way more efficient than 2D as 3D models and animations can be reused and the lighting-model is (traditionally) shared across objects in the world - with 2D it's a new sprite for every entity that interacts with every new feature and lighting can be rigid (but 3D practices have made their way back to 2D with projects like sprite-lamp).

Because this game is based around the animations of the characters for the combat, I've hit a roadblock with the Animator object. I just need to read into it more and fiddle around with it until I can get it working, but pretty much, I need all animations to be able to cancel each other while still tweening if they interrupt. At the moment, I'm using a shitload of Animator variables and having the animation states all tween to each other if the requirements are satisfied, but if you want to do two of the same animation in a row, I had to hack my way there by updating the animator twice in a single frame.

The animation tweening is also awfully inconsistent, where the animation will fire off up to about 0.4s later than it should with no good reason why. Sometimes it'll be fine, sometimes it won't. This makes all animations feel sluggish and unresponsive, which is the polar opposite of what I'm trying to achieve.