What I'm currently working on... (environment graphics)

Worlds of Chaos: Invasion

Worlds of Chaos: Invasion is a single player, party based open-world tactical RPG with a strong emphasis on exploration, tactical real-time-with-pause combats and party creation. It has a deep, fun and intense combat system that will challenge you to your limits, and will make clever decisions count.

I want to take the habit of making public what I'm doing a lot more, it's a weakness I have to be quite private on my work, so here it goes. I'll try to do it regularly. These last days, I've improved the way the natural environments look. I've realized that for terrain ground, it's way better to have 1 huge texture (2048x2048 or 4096x4096) with a lot of variations inside it, than many textures that you mix in the game engine, for a lot of reasons... simplicity being the main one. Simplicity in everything is very important, and it's something I realise more and more. The more complex things are, the longer it takes to modify or improve them, and that can be exponential. And it just looks much better with very little effort. With that, I also want to make more variations in environments. I will make 5 (maybe more) different outdoor "styles" for the game. I use a generator I programmed to help create the maps, and each map has a style, from which the generator create environments automatically with what I give it... if that makes sense. I choose what goes where, and it generates the map with the style it was assigned. Creating good looking maps is really fast and easy with that tool, but making interesting maps can still take some time. This generator is great to create good-looking generic environments, but I still want to make each area unique. I also want to make the game more graphically cohesive. I admit that I bought models from the unity asset store, but this makes a mess of the project, with random folders all over the place and objects, textures everywhere... it's not fun to work with that. And not all the styles are working well with each other, but I only use the best of what I bought and what I produced myself and with the help of 2 graphic artists I hired. I want to do 2 things : make the graphics styles as unified as possible and make most graphics unique to my game. I'll probably keep some of the one I bought, but I'll certainly modify those that don't fit that well with the rest, that are placeholders for the moment. I'm becoming a way better graphic artist than I was, by working with graphics so much... it's something I was very bad when I began. I've studied a lot of recent games graphics to see what was good or not, and how they did it. One great example of what I like the most and would like to resemble is Magicka 2. Simple and beautiful. I know that I will not be able to do as good as that, but I can learn from it or use it as reference material. Well... that's it for now. I go back to working on the game. The main reason I didn't do these kind of "updates" is that they take time to do, and they take me off the game itself. But I guess they are useful to connect with you, the players and interested gamers, so I'll continue them.