Blogs - boing

After finishing the last textures and props for the house, tweaking lights and adding some color-correction my small Teaser is finaly here: Still very rough around the edges, but it should give a pretty good preview.

Also more screenshots :)

i was just not satisfied with the cliff and the hill from the last screenshot so i remade all displacements. As i mentioned before working with displacements in source is realy fun especially, when you have a rock texture thats only tiled on one axis, and you use the $seamless_scale option in your .vmt and source starts rotating your texture and realigns it in a "very unnatural way" and you realize you have no control about its position and... whatever... heres a new screenshot of the rebuild cliff and another one from the hills backside.

As you can see the frames are dropping due to zero optimization. Once i have a team working on the mod i will hopefully be able to delegate it to someone else ;)

This update is exclusively To all my watchers :D
Progress is going on nicely. Things ive done during the last week:
- created blendmodulate textures for more reallistic textureblending
- created a low density material for the sprites
- added normal maps to the materials
- new rock materials
- created some more props, like driftwood and rock-sets
And possibly the biggest updated:
- more Terrain-shaping

Next i will do... even more displacements... You can expect screenshots from new areas of the map
within the next week

So i finaly got my sprites to work correctly. They actualy look better then i thought, but i will still have to use grass models for the borders between grassy and non-grassy areas.

I also started to work on the layout of the map. Got everything sketched on paper and build some first areas in the editor. Subdividing huge areas of your map is no fun and takes forever, so i spend the last weekend blocking out the main terrain geometry and fixing it all for subdivision ... lots of trial and error .... lots of waiting ... and lots of frustration

This weekend i worked on more foliage using some textures from cg-tectures.com and some i made in holland last weekend. Next i will work on the detail_props and detail_sprites for the ground textures. I never did some sprites before so im curious how it will work out.

So after a wonderfull weekend in New Kids Country Holland i worked on some basic ground blend textures. I also got the first tree model done, which will be animated later.

Note the grass on the bottom of the tree will be reworked once i start working on the detail props.

"So I have this awesome game-idea, but i need an animator and a coder for the source engine..."

Along with an explanation of some vague gameplay features i posted this on the moddb forums. Understandably it didnt get me far, so i decided to create some Interactive Teaser/Proof of Concept.

This is my devblog where i post news and screenshots about this little project.

Awesome working title is "Nine"

The game itself is basicly survival horror, a mixture between Allan Wake and Amnesia The Dark Descent might explain it the best.

Since this devblog is only about the Teaser (that will hopefully get some people interested in working on the game) i will not write too much about gameplay mechanics and ideas for the final game, but about the design process of the Teaser itself. Keep in mind that i will create all the textures and models by myself and wont be using any Valve stuff, so even though its a rather short project it still might take a while to get it done.

It all starts with some reference images:

The basic mood of Nine is rather depressive/cold , just imagine the last picture a bit darker, add some slight fog and rain and you get the idea.

Currently im working on the ground textures and the foliage. As soon as i have some models done i will post them here.

Greets, Eric