Data First Design

Data first design is an interesting subject. My favorite video I have seen on the subject is the below talk by Mark Bastian. The thing about his talk that I enjoyed the most is that he actually uses a game as his example explaining the topic.

I took the concepts from this talk and explored this approach for a few weeks and I found some very awesome things. In the near future I would like to share out some of the things that I have found and show some progress the project I have started up using this kind of approach. One thing that I will say right now is that it is really fun to design a game and its logic without actually writing any code.

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Level Buddy | Blender Addon

An old-school CSG inspired level editor add-on for Blender 3D. The add-on is still very much a work in progress but fairly solid for blocking spaces super quickly. Just because graphic fidelity has gotten insanely good and hyper detailed doesn't mean we shouldn't look back how older games were put together, at least that is my opinion. One thing I always come back to is how quickly the tools in the first 2 versions of Unreal Ed 2 and Doom level editors allowed anyone to block out a level, iterate on feedback or try an idea out. So I just took some time to put together a similar pipeline right in my 3d package of choice. I wanted to keep it simple and quick to try out level design ideas. You can use it for simple white boxing of your level, break it up into multiple static meshes and import them into your game engine of choice or you can use that as your starting point to start more detailed modeling ....

Mega Cow | Video Game Mockup

We All Have Crazy Game Ideas...This Is Just One Of My Own Yup its a giant mutant cow... Using Inkscape I made this game mockup after watching some MST3K late one night. I thought it would be fun to play a game where you were the giant creature causing all of the destruction. That is the reason the giant cow is on the right of the screen instead of the left. The player would move through the level from the right to the left, the opposite of pretty much every scrolling game... looks good in my head but might not work in actual game play. Below are some images showing the progression from rough sketch to final mock-up.

Rocky Terrain | Blender Internal Rendering

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene. The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D . It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours. The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates. This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes. Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions. It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form. After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up. Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...

atomic monster

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