#neverset

Well its been a hot minute since my last post. But lets just get straight back into it!

It’s Beta time!  Throughout Beta, it was a bit of a confusion. We decided to change our game engine from Unity to Unreal, for many different reasons. This didn’t effect much of our game progress as our level designer, Daniel, spent the holiday remaking the game. It ran a lot more smoothly and was easier going forward from here than it was with our luck with Unity.  With the change of engines, luckily this didn’t effect my own progress within the game at all. 

3D MODELLING

I’ll admit. I was pretty nervous to start the modelling on the characters. So I started off with the character sketch:

Just a basic front+back reference for me to work off of.

ZBRUSH

The first program I started with was Zbrush, where I started from scratch and modeled Tara.

She took a few days before she was finished. There were a few additions I put to the model that wasn’t in the concept art originally which were the gloves (Baseball gloves) and the eyebrows being 3D (however this was taken away on the final model.) 

MARVELOUS DESIGNER

One of my favorite programs to use when 3D modelling is Marvelous Designer. It’s just fun to mess around with the simulation feature and watch fabric cling itself to the model. Always gives me a good laugh.

So after Tara’s High Quality Model was created it was time to make her clothes. 

It wasn’t too tricky, which I was surprised with due to the fact that the last time I used Marvelous Designer was back in 2017 on an old school project which was a bit difficult to get around at first (had to redo that characters clothing about 7 times before it came out properly.)

The only differences from the concept art was that I gave Tara a crop top instead of the T-shirt seen in her original concept art. This is mostly due to Marvelous Designers weird problem with layering clothing (which I ended up figuring out how to fix in the next model) and also due to the fact that I was wearing a lot of crop tops this summer and really liked them. You know like-Creator-like-Character? 

You can see the 2D view at the end of the row of pictures above. If you’re really into making clothes, its actually pretty simple to get used to marvelous. I love working with the program and can’t wait to use it again.

MAYA

Far out Siriah how many programs can you use for one character?! The answer is at least 4.

So now that Tara is all glam and ready to hit the Mani’s, she needs to be converted into low poly. As opposed to Marvelous Designer, this is my least favorite part of the 3D Modelling process.

To be honest I was getting pretty impatient too. This was around the time when we began working with Unreal instead of Unity, once we came back from our holiday. 

The importance with making a low poly version of a game character is to optimize space for your game. Too many polys can really severely effect the optimization of your game. 

With the low poly completed, the UV’ing was sent to a higher up (my tutor because he could do the UV’s in half the time it would take me)

Looks funny.

BUT WAIT THERE’S ONE MORE!

SUBSTANCE PAINTER

This was probably the biggest learning curve for me as I’ve only really used Substance Painter like twice. But thanks to the supervision of my Tutor I learnt a lot from this time using Substance.

And with that, Tara was then complete! I enjoyed the process of going through Tara’s character creation, from drawing her to creating her in 3D it was a lot of time and effort but so worth it in the end.

That was only Taras process, Zac was a whole different ball game but basically very similar in terms of the 3D modelling process, so to save myself some time I’m just going to post below the screenshots of Zacs process and final model.

ZAC

After a week off for a break, Never Set entered into its Alpha stage which admittedly started off incredibly slow. The motivation for the team had seriously fallen through and it took us almost two weeks of production time to really get back into the swing of things. 

Nevertheless, Never Set Alpha lives on!!

DIALOGUE AND NARRATIVE

As the game begins to take more of a shape, the important core aspects start becoming more of an importance. Recently I have begun writing down the many scripts we will need between Tara and Zac, most (if not all) of the story elements that will be given to the player will be shown through conversations between Tara and Zac.

Above is a screen shot of Final Fantasy 8 (contrary to popular opinion FF8 will always be my favorite FF game because it was the first one I ever played.) An old PS1 game that had dialogue and narrative through speech “bubbles” and even from time to time had dialogue options that the player could choose through to get different conversations. For Never Set I was looking at something similar to this class RPG approach to dialogue and narrative. The characters will be telling the story through conversations. 

A more modern version of this approach is from “Night in the Woods” (another indie developed game that has heavily influenced many areas of Never Set). In this game the dialogue and narrative is also spoken through conversations with the characters, however done in a more streamlined style, the characters each have a colour to represent themselves and tell the player who is talking. This approach style wise is something I am looking at achieving for Never Set.

SCRIPTING

Currently there are around 10 different main story conversations that Tara and Zac will go through that the player can experience throughout the game that will give main story beats to the player. To break them up there will be “filler conversations” where Tara will ask Zac about small information on the town that will be placed on repeat until the next main story beat is reached.  It’s been fun to create dialogue for both Tara and Zac, as it helps me make out their characters in order to create a more authentic and believable characters.

FIRST TESTING IN GAME

Currently we are working on the dialogue system which is definitely still around prototype stage. Because at the time we didn’t have the scripting ready it was difficult for us to know how to work on the dialogue system from then on. After a few conversation tests it is easy to find the first few bugs we need to fix.

LONG CONVERSATIONS

The biggest main problem at the moment is that some of the conversations scripted are too long and with the system that we had coded for now didn’t have a function to detect when the sentence was too long to therefore cut it up so it wasn’t cut by the edge of the screen. (as seen in the image above) 

Ideally our vision is our conversations to look something along the lines of the above image, however another problem we have come across is that words will be cut at random areas, giving incomplete words (such as “diet” becoming “die-t”)