#basidia

Basidia Post #4

Vintage CGI:

Modus Interactive and I have been spending the last week or so learning how to use Alias Power Animator 9 which is essentially an old version of maya. It was used on sgi workstations back in the day on games like ff7 and mario64 for all the pre-rendered stuff. For a long time Modus and I have been pretty invested in learning how to replicate the look of old pre-rendered stuff, and, as it turns out, the best way was just to do it how they did it. For so long I tried to wrap my head around how old cgi stuff was modeled because the sorts of shapes that were often created seemed like they'd be unnecessarily hard to create with polygons. The thing that specifically stumped me for a while was how they handled wrinkles in clothing and organic shapes. As it turns out, the answer was hidden right under my nose the whole time. They weren't using polygons at all! Instead they were modeling with NURBS! It seems very obvious in hindsight, but I feel like I deleted the memory of NURBS once I exited highschool, and nobody ever seems to talk about or use them these days. If you don't know what they are, it's basically a style of modeling that involves making a bunch of bezier curves and using them to define surfaces. It's a totally different style of modeling from polygons with a lot of pros and cons, but it achieves that smooth look we're after extremely well.

Scout Rifle Render:

As shown in the pics above, I decided to make a model of the scout rifle in Basidia so that we could use it for an item icon. The process was definitely a learning experience, and one of the things I learned is that modeling like this is super fun. It's like creating each shape is a puzzle where you need to theorize what is the best approach to take, and following through is always a multi-step process of defining a surface and slicing it up. I find it super satisfying to pull off, and making slapping materials on it is always fun as well. Moving forward we are probably gonna use this program and/or older versions of maya to create any pre-rendered item icons or backgrounds that we'll be needing. Modus actually made new versions of the vials in it as well which I will put right here \/

Wow there it is would u look at that. Power Animator just has an amazing way of outputting some unique, rich colors that are hard to get in modern software. I mean, just look at that cork. How do you make a cork have such interesting colors? Amazing. Fuck it, I'm gonna show off a little guy I made in power animator that has nothing to do with Basidia. I've been hyperfixating on this program since I downloaded it so I owe this to myself.

Here he is! Power animator has this amazing glow effect you can put on any shader that adds this bloom as a post processing layer. I used it on the head in this one, and I think it achieves a particular dreamlike effect really well. The sorts of shapes I can get for cloth out of NURBS is also super fun and rewarding, as shown with the cape here. Character modeling is something I'm always really excited about, and I'll definitely be modeling some Basidia characters in this thing.

Conclusion:

Basidia Post #1

Introduction:

The Winds of Basidia is an adventure roleplaying game that I am co-developing alongside Modus Interactive. It's a sequel to his previous game The Snow of Basidia. Our main inspirations for this project include the n64 Zelda games, Fallout: New Vegas, Nausicaa, and Pathologic.

Tha Plot:

The kingdom of Basidia faces an apocalypse in the form of an extremely deadly, infectious basidium storm that is set to hit by the end of the next three days. Luckily, following an assassination of the king, the protagonist (a lowly nobody) chances upon an ancient artifact that was lost during the altercation. With this artifact they can relive the last three days of this beautiful, dying land over and over in order to try and find a way to save it.

Tha Factions & Misc. Basidia Politics:

There are three major factions in Basidia that are all trying to realize their own solution to the storm. Through their actions, the player can aid and join them on their respective quests. These factions include the Basidia Military, the Basidia Church, and the Rebellion (note: these are all working titles). The military and the church are in the process of fighting for primary control over the kingdom following the king's assassination. The military feel as though they have the majority of power and resources, so they should be able to take charge. On the other hand, the church feel as though they were second to the king in terms of closeness to God, so they have a right to be in charge. The military would prefer to just eliminate the church, but they cannot. The church is extremely important to the citizens of Basidia, and the military cannot risk losing that support. Operating in the background of this tension is a relatively small, organized anarchist-rebellion group. They were responsible for the king's assassination as a means to cause infighting in the kingdom. They operate through a horizontal hierarchical structure, and they are made up entirely of any Basidia citizens that believed in the cause. I'll leave it at that for now. Maybe I'll go into more detail with these factions and their motivations another time.

Tha Mechanics:

So this game is taking a while to develop due to how many interworking mechanics we need to build (as it turns out making a whole rpg is a lot of work). We want to emphasize player freedom (shocker ik), so we have to account for things like the player being able to kill whoever they want and go anywhere they want. This game has a timeloop, open-ended world, murder, infected areas, gliding, resource gathering, a weird marble lock system, a bomber's notebook type thing, etc. Maybe I should go into detail about the gliding since the game is kinda named after it. The player is going to be placed in a fairly vast world that takes a while to traverse on foot; however, as the game progresses the player will acquire various different types of gliders that they can equip and use. With these gliders the player can, well, glide freely to get around quicker, access new areas, and generally get more stuff done within the time limit. Sorry this section is poorly structured and rambely, but there are so many details I could go into for each mechanic that its probably best I just save a lot of it for individual development posts.

Conclusion:

Basidia Post #2

Menuz:

A lot of work put into Basidia goes into the various menus and ui elements. I'm sorry if it's not terribly interesting, but for the past two weeks its basically all I've been looking at. More specifically, I've been working on a door lock system and a bomber's notebook style journal.

Lock System:

The Winds of Basidia is a time-loop game, and, as such, Modus and I have put a lot of thought into how we want to allow players to take knowledge they've gained into a subsequent loop and do things faster next time. One of the things we came up with was a lock system. The idea is that the player will go through some questline to learn the combination to a lock, and then on the next loop they can just skip the quest and go directly to the lock with the combo they've recorded. For the actual design of the lock, we came up with a marble turning system somewhat inspired by various Myst and Riven puzzles. There are four marbles placed on a comet-shaped bit of blue marble that can be turned in 4 different orientations. The comet-shape has cultural significance with ties to the Basidia church, but I'll likely go into more detail about that another time.

Reminder Screen:

The journal is made up of two sections: the reminder screen, and the locks screen. This menu is a feature I've been very excited to implement, and as of today the "reminders" section is nearly complete. The locks screen will be used to manually write down any lock combinations the player comes across, but I haven't gotten started on it yet. The reminders screen allows players to scroll through a list of discovered locations and manually place little reminder icons on a timeline that goes through the three days that the game takes place in. That's basically it. Despite my excitement I have a hard time finding things to talk about with this menu. I just really love it when games put the onus on the player to keep track of all the things they have to do, and I also love it when games give the player little tools and interfaces to do with what they will. In a way, I think that (for a lot of genres) the closer a game plays to an operating system, the better. I am really happy with how the visuals for this screen came out, and I think that coming up with and adding in new little icons to represent things the player might want to make note of will be fun.

Conclusion:

whoop forgot to answer this. IDK Nicole would he? Would Jovian let Bas eat his feet onions? 

Basidia Learning - An End to End Solution for NEET UG