Cron

I would just like to take the time to post a screen shot where I get to show a lot of the first iteration stuff for the first episode of Cron. I have to be honest and say that I haven’t exactly written the episode fully :S Or hmm.. I could split hairs but basically all I’ve written this far is in “novel-form” i.e. chapters and as you would find it in a book. This content need to be adapted to fit into the narration tool-set of games.

First of all I have a general idea of how much ground I would like to cover in the first episode, without being entirely certain yet. But I will have use for the kits I am developing, no doubt about that. But I am thinking about ways to take the story and find a reasonable chunk to size down to a playable portion.

I am getting a lot more serious about all of this and I am doing a plan right now for the next couple of years and have a fairly good view of when I will do what, and this far I am quite content with it.

Anyhow I only intended to do a quick update now.

Just a quick shot of the first iteration APT in the making. The APT is the main means of transportation through the caves in Cron. I have made a couple of options for the cockpit but it remains undecided.

If so, why not help me out by filing in this survey about episodic gaming?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScbB0wU5N941xRfJ0xCQI0U1F8DK1RDrcyLdaODFtnUtBAcSw/viewform?usp=sf_link#responses

Hi there.

At times I wish I could do video blogs as it tend to be a bit more relaxed than writing. But I do like to have a place to put my thoughts.

I am going to talk about completely different stuff than Cron today, but perhaps a little Cron will make it’s way in as well. I mean if you are interested in this project you might feel like I haven’t had a whole lot of progress as of late. It is somewhat true and somewhat false. I am making slow progress but I am not doing all that easy to elaborate upon stuff. Mainly building layers of rock walls in a huge cave. It’s time consuming and difficult to get it believable, it’s difficult to work with overlapping geometry and so on. So quite time consuming but I at least have the cave pretty much covered right now.

Anyhow this is still not all I’ve been doing as of late and other things are borrowing time and it’s those things I wanted to write about today.

First of all, my whole family has been sick for the last 3 or so months in different ways and it has taken its toll to say the least. 

Other than that I’ve been working on my portfolio-type-web-page for a bit which is something I’ve wanted to put together for quite some time now but I have a tendency to dream a bit too big and end up putting it off. So I think I am going more realistic even if I really should have more of a plan for it, but hopefully I will at least be able to put something together.

I also made a project that came a bit out of the blue. You see I am quite interested in VR and had done an implementation of the tower of hanoi a while back. I wanted to bring that implementation into VR, just for the fun of it. I mean it’s a nice scope for a project you can finish in a couple of days and a great way to get to test doing something in VR.

I can’t seem to find any cool pictures of it but this is the model for the game board I made.

I am otherwise occupied watching the GDC talks from Bethesda about level design and modularity. I find it super interesting how they think about the project as a tier-type iteration thingie. Like working in a broad sense on the game refining over time. I really like that idea, I have talked about it on numerous occations already. I also find the idea of having kits  interesting for modularity.

However being a one person gang and especially the product I am making with Cron fit pretty poorly into the iterative idea as such, However I am trying to figure out how to apply more of the ideas onto my process. I believe that one of the more important parts when working on a project on your own (or in a team for that matter), is to keep feeling flow. If your first iteration would give you an unpolished version of your final vision this flow comes much more naturally.

I’ll save further ideas about it for another time.

Hi there!

I am writing a bigger post on world creation and working with building a world has led me down some pretty dark alleys (is that the way to write that, plural of alley?).

I found myself trying out building huge meshes and failing getting them to quality. I tried to build small meshes and piece them together and almost died from boredom. I also tried to have tiling, modular geometry which I could piece together to this huge cave (and it’s not even remotely the biggest one I have to make :S). I like the latter.

However tiling is nice to have and difficult to achieve in some regard and I will go over how I do to create seamless textures using a 3D-painting tool. It should be possible to do with blenders texture paint, substance painter or other 3D-painting tool really.

Step one (and I have longed to say this, every good tutorial maker out there has said it and now it is my turn!). So, Step one open a new file in blender, and delete the lamp, camera and cube. (ahhh, that felt rejuvenating!)

Create a grid shift-a > Mesh > grid and set it to do 4 by 4 subdivide.

tab into edit mode and face select. Select one face at the time and unwrap it. This makes every face fill the 0-1 space of the uv-map.

You don’t want to unwrap all at once then it will look like this which is wrong.

If you did it write, one face at the time you will end up with it looking like this:

The idea here is that you can make use of the middle or center square for drawing and anytime you draw outside of it, the content is seamless. So you end up with this type of thing, where I’ve drawn one heart and one diamond.

I barely know where I want to begin. I feel that I haven't really said what this project is all about. Just the progress. I will get back to this in the end but I want to take a little detour getting there. Basically when I started out in games, (beginning to feel like a long time ago! :S), everything was secret. To go to an interview for a job you could be sure you would be asked to sign a custom made NDA.

But basically you couldn’t even tell your next of kin what you were working on because what if someone else would copy your work!? (or whatever the reason might have been).

I never really liked it, I mean I can see huge companies investing years of work with staffing in the hundreds (or even thousands) might want to know that they have the head start before they tell us what they are working on. Further, when someone like Blizzard, Nintendo, Bethesda or Rockstar tells us they are working on something, there is the element of hype. This hype doesn’t happen when I am telling you that I am working on a project that I am calling Cron.

First up: “Qrikko who?” You don’t know me like you know Nintendo, Rockstar, Bethesda or Blizzard. Few know that I’ve been CEO of a game studio and some random person wandering in here might have played Magicka 2. But my (blunt) point is that when I announce that I am working on a project that I am calling Cron, no one cares.

So, being an unknown indie-developer, or even unknown indie-studio you have nothing to gain from secrecy. In fact if you want even one person to go from Qrikko who to hype, you better share what you are doing!

So I am trying to do so. I try to share my progress, thoughts and failures. Because I would like for people to take an interest in what I am doing. I am ashamed at times at what I share, many times I am way out of my comfort zone, like sharing graphics and animations. But I do it in hope that I will gain interest and perhaps encouragement. I also try to share everything I find on social media that others do that I like. Things to help other indie developers broaden their audience. So let's get down to business I've made some kind of a point in that being restricted with what you want to share is a luxury owned by the big names. So why don't I shut up now? I am glad that you (even if a bit rude) should ask! What to not share? Well highly subjective, but if you are doing a detective story it's often quite unsatisfying both to the reader but also to the author to get the plot up front: "the killer is the priest". I am not sharing story in any depth, I might down the line but at the moment I don't. I also have some quite unique, qnd largely untested ideas which I don't want to share for that very reason. I have a grand vision and I am looking forward to get the chance to test how well it all works. So that's my thoughts, sharing the right things at good intervals is important as an indie developer. To gain interest, encouragement and feedback is also important. We don't do this to earn a living or to deliver our share of workload. We are doing it because we love doing it and believe in it. That's why we're doing it right now, at least that's how I see it.

So since we are talking about sharing, here is some work in progress images ^^

Phew, I am getting there, enlightenment around the corner! I am a bit new to character animation but I did think that I knew it well enough. I was wrong :P Nah, but I have learned a lot from animating Cron.

I found yesterday a problem in my rig that has haunted me giving some of the problems I talked about last time. Mainly I have made use of turning of inherit rotation to gain (what I thought was) control of the deformations. So I had for example it turned off for the head (which makes more sense) and for the feet (which I can’t even remember my reasoning behind!).

What happened was that I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it loop, because If I have a turn animation, say walking left, and I reset rotation for the head and feet on frame zero, I go to last frame do the same then the question is how much should I rotate these to make the loop?

This is not obvious, first of all I have rotated the master control (i.e. the full rig) say 90 degrees around the center of one of the circles from the picture in my last post.. this one.

Then I thought that it would be correct if I rotate the foot control 90 degrees plus initial rotation. However this is not exactly correct, as the root bone rotates around the center of one of the emovement circles the foot would also need to rotate around that point, and I would need it reset before doing so. The thing to take away from this is that it got quite difficult to keep track of these rotations.

What I did instead is to inherit rotation and it is enough to do the above. Sorry I guess it got a bit messy now :P

I wanted to also talk a bit about the world building as I’ve gotten some ways in designing and more importantly implementing the cave around the initial house.

I have made a couple of props, I will make more but they are giving a nice ambiance to the scene. I am also doing rocks to patch together walls.

These mushrooms I call Cole agari they tend to grow on rocks and in the vicinity of water. they glow with a purple shine.

These scary flowerlike mushrooms I call flora agari they grow in water both shallow and deep. 

The cave is coming together, it feels nice as it will be a bit of a milestone when I can leave it for a while to work on the next parts.

Moving along I guess I will start creating the APT (Air powered transportation) which will be used for transportation to the core. The core is another part to build, it is huge and I am not sure how to build it and how much time to expect I need to build it, but it’s quite important to get in for the first parts.

Last of all for this time I wanted to show the animations, and I need to admit I found this really difficult and feel a bit afraid to show it :P But well here goes, this is how Cron moves at the moment.

idle, simple breading.

Walking

Jogging

Running

Turning

Sharp turn

Walking turn

Walking sharp turn

Jogging turn

Jogging sharp turn

Running turn

Running sharp turn

I am going to start writing this so that I’ll at least have a draft so I can get it done at some point. I really want to write this as I’ve learned a lot from “re” animated Cron.

So I started out a bit unorganized doing a walk, reading an article, getting a run animation, reading some other stuff.. All of these are pretty straight forward, idle is pretty simple, no motion just posing pretty much. Walk is pretty simple, it looks just fine after posing and the same goes for jogging and running.

I decided pretty soon that I wanted to make use of root motion as I like the idea, and I also set up a 2D blend tree since I want Cron to handle quite exact and snappy I set up a tree with two degrees of turning for each movement state. This is where it started to get difficult.

First of all finding material on google on how you make a walk or run cycle is simple, finding one for turning is not as easy. I had a short chat with a great animator I know and got some ideas about the posing and expression. I tried first of all to wing it more or less. So I tried to turn it around as I animated a same-pace animation as the straight walk. I didn’t really get happy with it and I struggled with understanding how to work with actions, dope sheet and NLA.

I got some animations in and went back to fix something in a previous animation found something that broke in subsequent animations and so on. I realized that my first attempt, to wing it, would not work because I just went back and forward putting out fires.

I guess I had my epiphany when for no reason my turn walking animation turned up like this.

I realized: Being organized is key in animation. I really want that stated. I find it helpful to keep organized while modeling, writing code or making music as well, but when it comes to animation I feel like you soon will loose track if you aren’t.

What do I mean when I say organized? Basically I mean to keep conventions, pushing actions that are ready onto NLA clips. But also to keep it clean, following naming conventions and so on.

At this point I went back, removed unneeded stuff and actions, basically cleaned it up. I created actions for the clips I want to produce for basic locomotion and sat down to think about how to do turning animations.

For the turning animations I realized I wanted a guide as they felt uneven and random as I did them first. So the way I remade them now was for example doing walk I created a new action from the key-frames of walk. and created a circle to use as a reference. I continued to create two more circles, one for sharp turns and one for running. I ended up with this. 

so now, when doing a left turn I will select the left turn circle and snap 3D-cursor to it. I then rotate the walk cycle around the 3D-cursor frame by frame with 4.5 degrees (I want to sample a 90 degree turn over 20 frames if you are interested in the maths). I then tweek it so that the feet works for the turn and also tweek the animation so that the head looks a bit more inwards and you tend to lean inwards when walking in a circle. For a sharp turn I do the same but the 3D-cursor in the center of the small circle and for run I make use of the big circle and so on.

You will have a relation to most of your keyframes, and if not that level you will for sure have that relation to your poses. Each control in your rig will have a set of key frames per animation, and scrubbing back and forth I would argue that you end up with a relation to all your key frames.

So you will gain a lot from keeping organized.

However, I still am at the stage where something suddenly doesn’t work any more. I have set up all my animations and am starting to tweak the feet and so on. And all of a sudden my head control starts acting up. I get this

There is no key-frame for the head when the bob occur, I have all other animation clips muted, I have checked other bones, I have deleted the key-frames and remade them, I have deleted the channel and remade it. I can see in the Graph editor that there seem to be something strange going on.

Anyhow that’s where I am at right now. phew! I am happy that I am having so much fun with it otherwise I might not have kept going. But I am and I will continue doing so!

In the world of Cron there is a lot, and I mean a lot of stone. There is different types of stone and this is what some 80% of my free-time brain activity is used for at the moment. Rocks that is.

So I am trying out some different ways to get the rocks and cave walls to look and feel the way I intend it to. This might seem easy but it really isn’t. It’s actually really hard as it turns out.

I started out trying to just model the cave and that way get a feel for how I wanted the cave around Cron’s house. This was helpful and I got a bit of a feeling for what I want to do with the environment, how I want it to feel, and so on. 

Looks pretty good for a 10-minutes test right? However one of the main problems I found early was that I just can’t get a good enough resolution for the cave! For reference the house where Cron resides is more or less 100 meters tall. So that means the cave might be some 130-150 meters tall at least. This would mean that I need a wicked high resolution for textures. I tried a 4k texture and I feel that I would want to go higher for sure to get it to an acceptable level.

This is more close to how you actually view the game, so needless to say this wont do for a cave wall. (yeah it’s the same render just closer!)

So I started to realize I might want to split it up a bit, perhaps I can still make use of the original cave but to put big rocks to break it up a bit and get it looking good even when you’re close to the cave walls.

So I went out and took some pictures to make a good reference base and that is what I am doing now. I still find it difficult but it is interesting to try it out. The result is going in the right direction but I have to make more pieces before I really can say much about it.

This is the original cave wall, already the details are too big and so it really doesn’t look all that great. (The roof floor has the same problem).

Here I make use of parts building the wall. I would argue that the result is much better.

It still is just using the very same mesh and material (instancing :D) And could be more dynamic with some more models. some more specific objects, like mushrooms, smaller rocks, stalactites and so on could probably produce a nice result.

One of the most difficult things I have had this far is to handle seams so there still is some ways to go before I get it to a good level.

I finally got to it and put together Cron’s hobo-style home. I am probably not done yet and I am a bit worried that I am going way to heavy on algae, rust, dirt and so on in the textures. 

I feel that perhaps I should put more debris and stuff instead, but well I will sleep on it for now and hopefully I will get some feedback and whatnot to consider.

I have been trying to do a bit of a dev-stream. I am quite focused while working and I kind of find it soothing to talk while working. I might do another one this evening depending of when the kids fall asleep. If So I believe it will be around 21.30 or even 22.00 CET.

What I will be working on is probably animation controls for Fauth, perhaps some basic animation if I get to that point. and probably I will find some problems with my weight-paint that I will be fixing as I find it.

Yesterday I had one viewer! (turned out that I was that viewer in another tab, so it is mostly for my own sake I will be doing it ;) )

More fauth, seems to never end ;)

But well the model is pretty much done, some rigging and skinning, animation and whatnot left, but here is some images for the time being.

Full body, I guess the hair is not really done, I tried to particle brush it in quickly but I am really not getting quite the result I am looking for. I am not entirely sure about all the textures and I guess I will have to look at it again after some sleep. But the hair I am most certainly revisiting at least. Oh, btw, the glove is kind of sticking out of the arm of the coat.

I kind of like the warmth and the cold as well, the ears leave some to wish for but all in all I kind of like it. Oh, btw, the coat is still just using some dirt, I haven’t worked yet on the buttons and so on.

And one to give a bit better look on the skin material, I think he might just be a bit too glossy at this point, the eyes aren’t really textured, the bottom lip is a bit all over the place, there is something strange in the uv on the neck, the ears are a bit too purple, the hair is both too hard on the edges and it just don’t look good.. there is a lot of things I could work on... :P

I believe that the sculpt of Fauth is done, or good enough, or I am leaving it at this or something similar. I am wondering if I should do some seems and stuff in sculpting or if it is better left to raw texturing. I find it hard to do in sculpting so I am going to try to texture buttons and stuff.

I find it really difficult to do cloths, but I am at least somewhat ok with the once I’ve made.

Basically he is wearing some random shoes, pants with a bit of width in the bottom, medical gloves and some strange half-butcher-half-scientific-coat. I had a bit of a problem getting the cloths to fall ok on his body, mainly because I made him super beefy :P I found it super difficult to make the cloths, both the ideas for them but mainly the arms! I am going with it because I don’t know how much it really matters once it’s retopologized and all.

and a close up on the face so if you are taking an interest or just feel like it, you can compare with the last one I put up to see if it did improve or become worse. I have pinched some lines in to give him more definition, mainly the eye-brows really popped and I got some definition in the forehead and around the mouth. I really like how he turned out and I hope I can bring a lot of the detail with me through retopo and texturing.

Hope you like it if you have started to take an interest into my project and/or art. I guess I should at some point try to explain what I am doing. Don’t worry, I will do it another time, or at least in another post. But to put it simple I am writing a book, I have been for some time and I love game development and would like to tell that story in a game. I have a lot of other plans and ideas going forward but let’s leave it at that for now.

Fauth face is pretty much done at this point, and I am quite content with it. Perhaps will do some more tweaks we’ll see how it feels when I haven’t looked at it for some time perhaps I want to change stuff then.

I am trying to go a bit more stylized this time around, I feel that it is a lot more personality coming in. I guess he is a bit beefy at this point :P I am not sure how to do it in the end but I kind of like the idea there as well. I have begun the work on the face and I think I like where it’s heading. However I am always really self critical and I will probably not ever make something that I actually think is good.