Tomorrow is a public holiday here in Australia, so I'm pushing up this post a day early (also.. technically a week late?)
These past two weeks have has had me in full steam towards making more art assets for Exoloper. The game just needs a lot of art, and while I could certainly make my life a lot easier by ignoring textures the way I did in Interloper, I think that added.. well.. texture will ground the game so much more, as it gives a sense of scale to the geometry.
I spent the beginning of last week testing the new art across the games existing combat levels, and one thing that immediately hit me was that while I'd covered the maps that needed to be chock full of stuff, I hadn't really accounted for the more empty ones. I was suddenly met with a bunch of questions, particularly, how do I deal with map borders on empty maps, how do I add variation to ground height to make the game feel less static on open maps, and can I reuse assets from other biomes? Sometimes you can't predict everything in preproduction!
With that, I'd finished up with the assets for the industrial biome that will be responsible for the majority of the free campaigns assets, and have begun work on the forest biome. Without going too much into the lore behind all of this, the forest biome is in the process of being turned into an industrial one, it's meant to show via the landscape itself what the Commonwealth has been doing on Rayleigh Prime, the KRS's homeworld during their exile.
For now that means I've also begun working on the aesthetics and functionality for that biome. A lot of the work I put in earlier this week into the badlands open terrain works well here, the forest regions of Rayleigh vary from thick woods to open plains, to rocky outcrops, dotted by Commonwealth mining and logging camps, and even the occasional landed Commonwealth frigate.
I was talking to my partner today about how the past few weeks have been different. I've been working on art assets, the kind of stuff I'd spent the much of my career doing. I can more or less just stop thinking when it comes to this stuff, I can churn out new assets and listen to podcasts at the same time, my brain isn't being engaged nearly as much as it is when I'm programming, designing or working on new features. And you know what? Its excellent. Sure it takes a fair amount of time to build these assets out, but it's relaxing, and I really enjoy it.
I think in the past I've tried to squeeze art into my games, doing so in between sprints of code, but having this separation of concerns has been a real eye opener.
To that point, I've got no idea what I'm doing next week. Guess I'll find out on Monday!
Beyond Exoloper I've also started thinking about some new games. I accidentally turned Exoloper into a Syndicate-esque style game last week when I moved the camera into 3/4 orthographic view and.. I think I need to make a game that looks like this now? No idea what it'd be, though something that played like the original Syndicate would be great.
I also began work on a PVE tabletop wargame inspired by Saint Decent's amazing Mage Hunter miniatures. There's something particularly evocative about the inquisition, and in particular her sculpts that make me think of a bunch of thugs barging their way into town, interrogating the townsfolk, trying to track down warlocks, wizards and other magically inclined folk, and of course, eventually facing them in combat.
Seriously, they're excellent miniatures, an absolute pleasure to paint.