Wasted Youth - Week 5 Progress Report

Another busy week, and a whole lot of progress. We're all getting very excited, as we're on the verge of getting the first art assets in-game this week, which will prove out our asset pipeline.

A lot of this week was spent on getting art assets ready for import into the game - we have a couple of props complete now with normal, specular and diffuse maps.

Our Jenny character has gone through the ZBrush sculpting phase and is now moving on to texturing. This is thrilling, as it means we can get our character rig built and ready for testing in the next week. Plus, she just looks awesome. Zach's done a great job on her.

Randy's been doing great work on the tank, too. The high-res mesh is complete, with placeholder colors to demonstrate how each plate is a separate object that can be colored on its own.

He also did some rigging experiments with the treads. We may use a path deform, like in the video below, or we may just animate the UVs for the treads - we haven't decided yet.

Alexi got the first house unwrapped and ready for texture tests, and we should have diffuse maps for it in the next week or so.

The house uses four different texture maps - one for the roof, one for siding, one for trim pieces and one for accessories like the porch, windows and chimney. This allows us to swap out a different roof style, for example, to create a ton of variety with very few assets.

Beau and I spent part of the weekend working on writing the script for the opening cinematic and promotional materials, and we're nearly ready to create the art for it. We're really excited about this stuff, but we don't want to give away too much yet. There will be more to show soon.

In terms of design, we've spent a ton of time working on improving the gameplay feel based on testing feedback, we've got placeholder UI in place and are working with the particle systems, greyboxing out the first few puzzles and getting the interactivity scripts such as scripted physics events and such working. We also spent a bunch of time finalizing our most recent draft of our GDD, which came out to nearly 60 pages! There's still a number of things we want to refine further, but it's been great having such a detailed blueprint for the project.

A lot of our meeting this week was spent looking at our task list and making sure everything was up to date. We're right on our expected schedule, and we may be bringing in another artist to assist with high-res sculpts and texture work, which is awesome. We've got a very busy couple of weeks ahead of us, but we're all motivated and working very hard to get stuff in-engine and get the game looking good. We should be able to get character animation tests in in the next week or so, and that'll be the last major pipeline test we need to resolve - if that works as well as we hope, there's nothing stopping us from cranking out art and gameplay through the rest of the year.