I rebuilt my indie game in a month

I don't know if you guys remember the good old days of nightly routine devl 3 but back then I had a demo that about 100 people participated in where you could play a shortened version of nightly routine to give feedback and Report bugs and reviewing the critiques I saw a couple comments along the lines of I know this is something you probably couldn't change at this point but the map feels pretty small and they were right the map was Tiny in comparison to the style of the gameplay and I've known this since day one if you look even farther back to the ancient days of nightly routine devlog zero I talk about how we had designed a bunch of maps but ended up scrapping them B which is mostly due to the very well-known proverb shock at hates environmental design and also he's bad at it which is still true to this day but it's something that I felt was always holding back the entire game from being what I wanted it to be so it was decided since the current models are over 18 months old I had the confidence that I could make a much better environment this time around in an effort to be methodical I planned out everything I was going to model gathered tons of concept art and designed how the new map was going to look kind of look I I got impatient I was excited to start the first thing I did was make a brand new Unreal Engine project and you might be saying shock hat why would you make an entirely new unrealed project when your current one is near in completion are you stupid yeah a little bit take a look at the current project it's about 3 years old at this point and the organization is abysmal it makes no sense let's say you need to open the blueprint for the pickup actor for the sword you have to open content then weapons character weapons zore old sword old and there it is what the heck even is zore old the entire project is like this luckily unreal makes it pretty easy to migrate assets from one project to another so I'm just going to move all of the important stuff into clean organized folders and leave all the bloat and buck in the old one my first step was to create a landscape but I needed to make new textures which I started cranking out in substance designer hey did you know you could buy substance painter and designer on Steam to avoid paying the Adobe subscription you didn't hear it from [Music] me within a day or two I made sand Cliffs mud and sand textures I decided against making any for grass because I love the way the current grass looks and I wanted to keep that style which requires it to be a solid color for it to work in fact nearly everything in the old project uses solid colors and all of them share the exact same texture with their UV shrunk super tiny to fit these color-coded grids this style worked fine for the old shock hat but dis pleases the new shock hat shout out to the homie Steph for the cool art and as I was copying over the grass I realized I was using a really cold shade of green which is totally whack because it's a Golem mine for the daytime to have warm cozy Vibes so I was totally missing the mark there and I made sure to correct that on the new landscape you might have noticed the sky box has had a massive Improvement as well I made the old one myself so I could have a day night cycle to my liking with a custom night Panda Moon but let's all say what we're thinking here it looks terrible it looks [Applause] terrible if you're subscribed to this guy you should be ashamed it looks terrible so I opted into purchasing the ultra Dynamic sky from the marketplace because Sky boxes don't really get better than that one plus it has a ton of customizability so I was able to create this new night Panda mood in [ __ ] and it looks fantastic finally it was time to actually jump into creating the models I knew trees were going to be the biggest hurdle but would be the most important part of my environment's tone I won't waste time going over my mini failed attempts so here's how I successfully made a stylized tree for Unreal Engine rapid fire style first I opened Affinity designer to create a leaf texture then I used the software tree it to generate a tree migrate them all into blender add spheres and blobs where I want the leaves to be give them a hair type particle effect change the hair to object make the object a plain with the leaf texture mess with the sizing and rotation convert the leaves into a mesh add an encompassing hemisphere transfer the normals from the hemisphere to the leaves bring the tree into Unreal Engine to make sure it looks properly fluffing in the lighting open up substance designer create a texture for the tree B apply the texture to the mesh open the mesh to create lods realize I have to make the lods and blender duplicate the model three times to make a lower polygon version of each which mainly involved deleting the amount of leaves which L big holes in the trees that you could see through so I scaled down the UVS of the leaves to cover more empty space and I bring all four tree lods back into unreal and for maximum performance create this one final billboard L which is just an image of a tree used for when it's really really far away I did this for three oak trees a pine tree a willow tree a dead tree and three birch trees so the trees were done but I still had a lot of work left I had plants rocks and 30 pieces of foliage so I started by drawing a foliage Atlas and CR this was a lot of fun for me because it brought me back to when I peaked my game Development Career by making living for plants foliage using the foliage Atlas was created as a bunch of flat planes that I bent slightly to get into the shapes I wanted overlaying sections of the atlas on top with this one texture I was able to create a fern some grass types these colorful flowers and this weird plant thing does anyone know what this is called I'm serious it's my favorite one I've made but I genuinely cannot find the name online now that it's all in unreal there was one more step to this process which is to make them feel alive I wanted some wind to flow through the map as you play but I wanted to go a little farther than just the basic built-in simple grass wind mode which is fine but there's room for improvement so With a Little Help from the best Unreal Engine YouTuber of all time prismatica death I created two wind functions one for plants swaying in the wind and one for plants fluttering in the wind we interrupt this program with breaking news this just it the nightly routine Community is the best there is and creates phenomenal fan art of cosmically beautiful proportions Joe these are incredible and do not go unappreciated just look at that style look at that finesse it's enough to make a crow man cow by now back to our regularly scheduled programming to determine which part of the plants would be effective by these forces I use vertex painting the more red I painted onto a plant the harder it would sway the wind I stole a python script to automatically gradiate the amount of red from top to bottom which resulted in trees that would bend at the top but stay completely rooted at the bottom and the more green I painted onto a foliage the more it would flutter in the wind I painted green onto individual leaves once again using a gradient so no green would be painted where the leaf meets the stem this combined with the red gradient would have a plant Sway in the wind with the leaves being pulled with a secondary Force which would flutter without detaching from the stem here's a quick list of all the foliage I vertex painted for the wind trees Bush red flower yellow flower blue flower bamboo grass Cattails that weird plant thing Fern of course there's also foliage that does not Sway in the wind so I sculpted some rocks in blender gave them some warm tones in substance painter and plop those boys in there rocks to me are one of the hardest things to model I feel like they should be easy since a rock is just an abstract shape but I think that's the exact reason every time I do try to make a detailed rock it looks nothing like one not again so while I can handle more spherical shaped rocks the only other piece of environment I decided to purchase were these really nice Cliff rocks since they were way nicer than anything I can make I use these Cliffs to block out the map I just ended up kind of winging it with their placement one thing I really wanted this time around though was specific floating islands for each Merchant they were already supposed to have their own specific environments but the old map was so small and all blended into each other way too much now I had the chance to actually act on the original Vision the settings for these guys first I did Rock B's desert area which is where the sand textures come into play I also really wanted some of those cool orange Cliffs that you see at famous landmarks like the Grand Canyon or fortnite so I modeled some of those up in blender too but shock cat I thought you said you can't make anything other than basic spherical rocks and yes you would be right these are actually just basic spherical rocks that I smush down and stacked on top of each other in fact almost every single Rock in every single one of these stacked formations is actually just the same Rock smushed and rotated in different ways now B's area looks nice and hot so I decided to cool it down by creating a new Cactus so long are the days of the old two-dimensional Cactus spikes now we're here for the real deal I gave the cactus a much cooler almost bluish greens to hopefully add some contrast to the hot orange biome I did the same with the agave plant which unlike the rest of the foliage I actually modeled since the plant is thick enough to require some depth in my opinion and on a whim I decided to add some other cool stuff like this rib cage Bridge which actually came out looking super sweet although maybe a little bit scary to walk on in the old first the river man lived in a river duh but was originally designed to be from a murky swamp hence making The Cattails the ferns and the mud texture that I mentioned briefly he still needed a murky River and a waterfall to sail through and those were easy to create in engine I also threw in some lily pads and lotus flowers and that makes me want to add frogs but animal nvcs is a whole another ballpark that I'm not ready for and lastly was digby's mushroom land I first decided to remake all the mushrooms that we see in the original version with some higher graphical Fidelity which was a blast to do in substance painters and so far I'm going with a bold decision of adding Blue Grass to this more Fantastical land we definitely need some more mushrooms than just the big three if we're going to have an entire Island for this area so I decided to create a waxy green a drippy black a fluorescent blue and a spongy pink I'm still trying to come up with some cool names for these so if you have any ideas please let me know in the comments and then of course we have our Giant floating island [Music] map [Music] I honestly still can't believe I did it I did environment design and honestly it kind of matches what I did in the middle not I added in this distant rain super far down as well as distant islands and fog cards to add some more depth and scale to the world and the only unfinished part was me putting together Mor theist uh I'm trying to redesign it in a way where there's multiple creative paths up instead of just one spiral so maybe the night pandas can take the king up in different ways or you have better ways to catch up to them and I didn't mention absolutely everything I did like these juicy crystals for example but I guess you'll just have to play the game to get the full experience but it's not out yet so you'll just have to wish list it on Steam instead it'll probably take a couple days to get it all updated so don't fret if it looks like the the old version now I've just been working on porting everything over I was going to do more by the time this video came out to possibly believe some tension that this was going to be a daunting task but the only thing that's made it so far is the inventory system and that only took a while for specific reasons it ended up having some really cool results so I'll save that for the next devlog cuz I'm getting a feeling this one's going to end up way too long and editing these videos takes freaking forever if you're too impatient I might start posting some updates on Twitter @ shock quack so you can follow me there too uh we'll see I'm going to try to I'm kind of bad at using social media almost as bad as I am at ending my YouTube videos

Channel: shawcat

Views: 146,758

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Id: q8WL1Z1W4Gs

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024