Thanks, GD.NET

Just the other day I received my copy of "Advanced Game Programming: A GameDev.Net Collection" from the publishers. Several months ago John Hattan approached me with interest in adopting my metaballs article into their book. Naturally I was quite thrilled just to be able to see my name in print, but they ended up also offering a small but generous work-for-hire payment as well. Thanks guys for making me a part of this!


A Very Isometric Journey

My initial burst of interest in Cyberspawn has once again dwindled since I finished implementing lightmaps. My main quip was that making content that looked good in-game was very difficult, since creating a in-game model is a matter of modelling the object, creating a texture/mesh for it, applying it properly onto the object, and then trying to get it to look as nice as it did in the editor in the game engine. Given my inexperience in artistic endeavors in general, it just felt too far beyond my abilities.

However, I was still really keen to expand my artistic horizons. I had been using Blender all this time, and I've been getting pretty comfortable with it. Remembering all of those wonderful games like Diablo, Fallout, or the Crusader series, I considered the (hopefully) simpler task of producing pre-rendered isometric art for a 2D game instead. So far, so good; I have the basics of the art and the engine started.



The floor and wall didn't take too long to make. The hardest part by far was getting the camera set up at a consistent and correct isometric angle, generating the renders in a size consistent with world scale, and then adding final touches to the final renders to make them interlock with eachother in an aesthetically-pleasing manner. I really like the way it turned out, and am confident that I can maintain an art style of this level for the rest of the needed content.

More about this new (again!?) project and its direction soon. Maybe I can take a page or two from O-san's delicious isometric work.