First Practice Model

 

Milestone first low-poly first attempt in Blender, at under 8k poly count.

LAWRENCE ELK

would make a good model to cut my Blender teeth on, I figured, as I already had a 'fat guy' obj model to reskin and resculpt, downloaded from somewhere long forgotten on one of my old backup CD's, and here's the result.  I didn't apply a normal map in this case but will do tomorrow. Found a great online mapping customizer NormalMap-Online here, a super handy tool I'll be using plenty in the future no doubt.  Normals? what- if I'm speaking Chinese here this link will explain everything about mapping.  

Here's another render with a gloss shader on the bug and a displacement map in place of the missing normal. It's unlikely I'll ever bother with doing high-res sculpts as it's too much work for one person. Instead I'll likely paint height-maps and convert to normals directly in Blender as demonstrated in this tute. 

Loving Blender but lord almighty what a struggle to wrap my head around all the zillion controls and shortcuts, everything from the modifiers and UV wrapping, getting to grips with Cycles Rendered and it's 'circuit board' Node system, to just getting the cam position to look like they do in the UI- it has taken many hours of my time.

Still, it's almost worth it for that moment when everything falls into place, and next time will be a doddle.

Personal

----------------

So, still living in Japan of course, and VR is hitting the arcades in a big way over here. Costs $8 a go and so it's definitely for novelty alone but man is it fun flying around mountains on a winged bike, or riding on a chopper whilst Godzilla incinerates Tokyo. I had the creepiest experience ever with this one game, where you go around on a wheelchair trying to navigate your way out of a type of zombie lair, it's cosplay and so I could see my wife (or her avatar) riding around and something about the avatar waving at me and knowing it was her freaked me the hell out. When we both lost to the timer and it went to a cut-scene where she got the head of her virtual manifestation cut off by a giant pair of scissors I genuinely felt distressed for a couple of minutes after, lol. 

Yikes- 7 sinful years since I last visited this blog.

And there I was was thinking "Hmmmm, back into the fray of game development, best get a blog going"- and was hunting around for a suitable spot when I suddenly remembered this one that I'd already created aeons back, lol what a shitty memory I have. And here we are again, back in the field, phoenix risen, passions reignited and all that. 

To address the question that I get asked the most, yes, I will be working on "The Insanity 3" eventually- though I'd like to revamp the first two games (extended versions) in all three glorious dimensions first, as a practice exercise if nothing else. The actual story for The Insanity 3 game has been written (vast majority of it anyway), but don't start tapdancing just yet- I'm still very much getting my bearings with the new development environments I've been adapting too, mostly Unity and Blender. I'm taking to them like a fish to water though and so there isn't much of a hurdle to leap over-- once you have the fundamentals down these game engines/modelling kits/programming languages- they're all alike. Actually Unity and Blender have come a long way since I last used them, and Blender in particular is light years superior than anything it used to be. I thought I'd have sprinkle some $$$ sugar out there to get Maya or Max but after a couple of days of piddling around with Blender I was impressed enough to scrap that idea.

Now, being honest- EvilKris is not a huge aficionado of blogging and the precious time it eradicates, but there's no wealth like knowledge, and if everybody else out there was equally compelled to keep their methods to their chest then none of us would get anyplace, and so I feel obliged to at least give a little back to the community, and hopefully grow a buddy network in the process. It's unlikely I'll make any actual tutorials like back in the old days but I will do my best to be diligent and not only post game updates but also the occasional tasty coding snippet or art tip, along with assets (see below) and links to other realms of online education I deem recommendable. 

So what does the crystal ball say for the future of the EvilKris gaming *scoff* empire? Well, here's my current train of thought: 


MAKING $$$ 

Back in the grand old yore of Flash, us devs could make a few quid/bucks through the CPC model or via company sponsorships, but this is the modern world of Patreon and Early Access models and so there's a good chance that's I'll be taking that route. Thankfully I have a day job that pays the rent, so lack of funds won't be the rain on my parade any day soon. 


PLATFORM 

PC downloadable. Would I make a mobile game? Not interested at the moment, but I'd certainly license my games out to be made on mobile though. VR? Abso-fricking-lutely. In fact, it's not too much to say that eventually I will veer towards VR stage development as it's clearly going to be the next gen zeitgeist to ride on, and once everyone and their mother has a VR headset for the latest PS5 or whatever then the indie world is going to detonate with cool VR demo's and I'd love to be one of that lot. Needless to say VR is the ideal medium for horror games...I mean- just imagine The Insanity in VR? Goosebumps right? You bet. For the time being I'm thinking the games or betas I make will be downloadable either directly from this or whatever page I transfer to, or if I can I will make them accessible on Steam. 


ASSETS

Do not expect jaw-dropping graphics while it's only me on me onesies as sole dev, sorry. Although I enjoy drawing and modelling, creating graphics is the most tedious, collosal task ever, and I'll simply have to find whatever ways I can to get around that fact or the peeps will be waiting forever for every release, and you'll have to promise not to be fussy. Anyway, with karma on my side the games will eventually attract some potential teammates for recruitment, or even make me enough cash to hire a couple of bonafide pro's to help out, but for the time being the graphics will be mostly legacy low-polygon bollucks with lots and lots of post-pro fog to cover up their ineptitudes; think PS2/PS3 quality models that are between 10-30k polygons with a bit of normal mapping thrown in-- and yeah, that's the best I can promise to start with. It's sort of advantageous that retro is in these days, lol. 
Most of my stuff won't be made from the ground up either, but more likely ripped from old games and tweaked enough to bypass the copyright laws and into 'transformative work' territory. Just being honest, lol, please pretend you didn't read that. Again, things are better than a decade ago and so there's almost any obj imaginable out there available for royalty-free download, very useful. 


PROMOTION

Experience has taught me that quantity with some quality works better than high quality and low quantity, (?) and that consistency and community are actually the keys to getting things going. I mean, look at Puppet Combo, this guy squirts games out his backside faster than Stephen King writes novels and though they aren't visually exquisite and a bit flawed they do something that 99% of horror games do, scare the fck out of people. And they do have style in buckets, I'm not afraid to admit I'm jealous of the talent this guy and his team has, nice! But more than that I appreciate that he's raising the bar a bit for other horror devs and spawning copycats, which is awesome.

Indie game developers are doomed to repeat the same mistake, they dive straight in early with their best game, spend years polishing their baby without getting it properly gametested right off the bat, thinking it's going to make them richer than Trump, and then *poof* the way of the Dodo the minute they release it. The internet is aflow with the carcasses of materialized indie dreams that were pushed from the nest without anyone to catch them. This transpired with one of my Flash games Sunken World, which although I'm proud of in terms of graphical achievement, gameplay-wise was a stone-cold turd..and I knew it early on and yet chose to ignore my gut like a fool. Wel, never again. Getting the 'hook' is imperative from day one. My motto; if I spend a month on a game and nobody is telling me how awesome it already is, I'm scrapping that putana. I'm thinking I'll just throw some work out there and see which venture sticks, launching pre-alphaware and seeing which project begets the best feedback- and those will be the ones that I'll put the most exertion into fleshing out. Naturally The Insanity games are a solid that I'll be working on in the background, but alongside those I'll be releasing a bunch of mini-tasters, small games swimming around my noodle at the moment which will probably never finish completely but will be entertaining for what they're worth.
That's where you folks come in.  Something I do want to do which I don't see other devs doing is to arrange a more collaborative and open-source framework, a place where you -the guys with talent anyway- can add to the games yourselves. I'll be uploading (some) assets for people to toy around with, to work on, improve on, and will also be releasing all my blueprints, project concepts, designs, menus, texture maps, models, anything preproduction, and let you have at it, to edit and tweak, remap, remesh, subdivide, bump map...whatever. And then you can upload it and we'll all see what you come up with. It'll be fun and of course, if I do decide to put it in the game then credit will be given, and dare I say even a share of whatever the game makes. Which leads me to the next point- 

PARTNERSHIPS

As always, I welcome potential team-mates wholeheartedly, however skeptical I become. So far I've yet to meet a collaborator that worked out but hey, I know, you get what you pay for right? Anway, if you think you have the chops then mail me. 

Alright that is it for the time being, tara.