atomic monster

So I got a little side tracked the last few days and missed my original date for releasing my two week game.  The time was not spent on the game but with general life and family stuff so I'm not going to worry too much about it.  So without further ado I posted the game I have been working for my two week game project to itch.io you can see the link below.  I will do another post when I have more time as kind of a short postmortem about the experience because I found it really interesting.

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 ....

Blast your way through hordes of venomous deadly snakes in this short and sweet low poly retro kick back to games like “Gun Smoke”.  While traveling to Red Rock Springs your horse finally succumbs to the heat after days in the blistering sun and dies of exhaustion.  With your trusty steed grazing the meadows of the afterlife you now must travel the dangerous grounds of Snake Bite Pass on foot. Features: Retro action Gorgeous low poly 3d visuals 3 challenging levels Simple controls and gameplay

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 ...

Another image based on the Tokyo flood tunnels.  Needs a bit more work and a some fixes but its almost there.  I'm really enjoying making these little scenes and would like to keep it up.  It would be great to get a new one done every week as its a really good practice to keeping the scenes small not getting caught up in the tiny details but focusing on the larger picture.  A good example of that is the stairs, since I give my self 2-4 hours for these scenes (not counting render time) I kept the stairs very basic with just cubes pushed and pulled to the right shapes with little to no detail.  Normally I would spend too much time getting caught up in modeling everything out as best I could...and then get bored and never work on the image again.  Keeping my self on a tight hourly schedule for these scenes I am able to judge what I should be modeling and what I can just use a box or other primitive object for and moving on.

When I was digging up reference images for the Tunnel scene I found a bunch of pictures from the Tokyo flood tunnels and that place is just too damn awesome so I had to model a quick something from it.  While I was modeling this one I kept thinking about a level in Mirrors Edge that seemed just like it so I went back to the game after I got to this point and sure enough there is a version of the Tokyo flood tunnels in the game too.  That section from Mirrors Edge is awesome and it gave me some really great ideas of things I can add.

Inspired by an Andrew Price tutorial where he creates a tunnel scene.  Figured I would take a stab at making my own version after watching the video.  It is really empty and lacks good detail but over all I was happy enough with how it came out given I didn't spend too much time with it.  Rendered using the internal render engine in Blender 3D.  The thing that really made this work came from the compositor inside of Blender.