4 replies to this topic

[fireside]

Hi all. I put up a UI demo of a web adventure game I'm working on and would like to get comments. You will need a Unity Web Plugin, so if you're against that kind of thing consider yourself warned. Anyway, it does very little right now, but has an inventory, etc. Mainly I took out the mouse look because I found it annoying so the player has to turn with the arrow keys in first person view. The mouse is used to find the few hotspots. A sphere, a door, and a letter. To tilt the camera, move the mouse to the top and bottom of the screen. The inventory will appear when the mouse is at the top, also. You'll need to use the examine icon on the letter. It's rough and ugly, so pay no attention to that. Helps load faster. Right click and choose fullscreen.

http://firesidegames.comze.com

[TheNut]

How about some screenshots for us non-unity folk (or a youtube vid if you're feeling up to it)?

[fireside]

I can give you this one I posted a while back. It's pretty boring since I'm mostly working on the UI. The house will be redone and textured, etc.



I've never done a youtube vid from a game. At the speed I'm working on it, I better stick with it. Currently getting back to working with Sketchup which Google apparently sold off, but it's still free. I'll do the texturing and finish modeling in Blender, but Sketchup is nicer for sizing, etc. I overdid this house and had quite a few problems. This time I'll just leave holes in the walls for windows and doors. I'll probably put the windows and doors in, in Unity. Make the doors into prefabs in Unity so they have all the scripting for opening. I got some useful feedback from one brave soul on another site. Kind of makes me wonder why I'm doing this, but it's something to do, especially in the winter.
I also found a pretty nice free web site that doesn't have advertising or anything. Maybe I'll put up a better front page eventually. 5 meg file size limit and I forgot what the transfer was, but seemed pretty good.

[TheNut]

Have you tried looking for artwork on BlendSwap? Some of their stuff is ultra high quality, but it's not terribly hard to reduce the poly count. I'm sure you'll find hundreds of free props to drop in your scene.

I'm not sure about sketchup having only demoed it very quickly and back when it was beta, but I haven't found Blender's scaling inefficient to work with. I prefer a mathematically precise scale, so I often manually set the scales according to physical dimensions. Most artists though just set the origin of the geometry to the floor and eyeball the scale. I guess I just like it for a one stop shop. Create objects and instances, assign UVs and materials, bake lightmaps, animate stuff, place sounds, export, done

For hosting, I would recommend you just personally host now and when you're ready to go prime time, invest in a host provider. They're not that expensive. A shared host will run you something like $40 a year with gratuitous bandwidth and disk space (and plenty of fine print!). Or you can hook up with Kongragate and the like.

BTW, what made you decide to do a 3D adventure game over 2D? I quite like adventure games, especially the classics like Myst and Riven. I've always preferred the 2D versions to 3D because of the added detail you can put into 3D renderings. Most of the newer adventure games have 1080P panoramic views too, which look amazing. I only bring this up because IMO developing a 2D adventure game mixed in with 3D puzzles is a lot easier to develop in comparison to a full-fledge 3D game. I've often thought about picking up tools like Terragen and mingling for fun with these sorts of things. Though, business is not as strong for adventure games as it used to be (except in Japan), so it would mostly be for fun.

[fireside]

I intend to put the game on Kongregate, so hosting isn't important. I really don't like keeping up a site. Sketchup has a tape measure tool and is much more a cad program than Blender. I need to make changes, like I'm exporting in STL polylines lately and plan on converting in Blender, which won't take long at all since it leaves a lot of quads except around doors and windows. Dimensioning is a lot easier and you can snap objects to faces, lines, midpoints, etc. Plus, it's very useful as a cad program when working on real world projects.
I went 3d because I've already done some 2d adventures, and I am using Unity lately. I was working on a platformer for a while and realized my heart wasn't in it. There are a million of those games out there already, so decided to do a 3d adventure instead. I've done a co-op 2d adventure on the Web a while back that was Myst like in character though it took place in a house that I modeled in Blender. 3d is lower poly, but it's nice when doors open and you go through, etc. Has a different effect. Blender does some pretty nice terrain very easily, but I'm not sure how much I'll use it, at least immediately. I personally think adventures only work in tighter places, so 3d adventures I've played end up having me walk around these large areas looking everywhere for hotspots, which I find boring. Telltale did some interesting ones, but maybe too many cartoons. They use fixed cameras a lot, etc. For an individual like me, it would work, since I could model smaller areas and if the game is large enough just transport around with a map or something. I just got 4 Wallace and Grommit episodes for 3 dollars from GOG. I think it works well. I've never been really into high poly modeling because of the amount of work involved. I prefer lower poly work.
I've seen Blendswap. Haven't checked them out for anything I need yet, but I will use as many free models as possible because a stove is a stove, or whatever, and I find that kind of work tedious. I plan to start on an "escape the room" game with a little bit of a story and if I like it, possibly expand to more scenes and possibly characters.