February Progress Update!

This month has been almost exclusively dedicated to settling down on a good workflow for the development of the town, and subsequently to start mapping everything out to get an idea of what it is going to look like at the end.

I also worked on polishing and optimizing other systems that needed extra work. And additionally, improved my Anthrogen workflow to include a better, more optimized LOD system.

Regarding the town...

I wanted it to read as a real town, navigable, and with a good sense of space, like... where commercial areas would be, residential areas, main roads... so i spent some time testing ways of developing a realistic and nice looking city plan, and then I found Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator! It's a way to create a simple map of a town based on your defined parameters, so I really recommend it...

I got so happy when I realized I could export my city as an SVC file. Then I could import it into blender, turn into a mesh, and extrude the buildings to get a rough tridimensional layout of the town.

Town Map, fresh SVG file!

Bender render of the town map.

I exported the towns 3d map as an FBX file, and there I went into replacing the gray cubes with actual buildings, preserving the layout and feel.

You can still see many buildings that are still just gray blocks tho. Still working on it... Also try to ignore the huge, black monolith in the center. It's meant to represent the main church that the town revolves around. Still need to work on the model.

I made these nice brick sidewalks. They always look so cool in pics of small british towns, so I wanted to include them.

An important issue is verticality. That is, slopes and hills and whatnot. Currently the town is just completely flat. it won't be that way in the end. So I need to work on the town's topology for the next days.

Improved the door transition system!

Now there's no clipping while inside or disappearing geometry. I'm happy with the results. I think the transition is smooth and convicting.

Improved LOD system

It's a very straightforward optimization system: each girl has 3 LOD models that are shown depending on the camera's distance. The farther you are from them, the crappier the model will be as to not render unnecessary geometry and materials.

This is Danny's papercraft looking low LOD model. It's her base mesh decimated to oblivion. It's so funny looking hah.

I basically just projected a screenshot of her texture into her mesh to create 1 single material.

Violet's lowest LOD model. Not meant to be seen up close. Only needs to look fine from a distance.

LOD group in action ^

n_n

Speaking of the girls...

The current villager line up from left to right: Sigrid, Danny, Rossa, Luna, Violette, Iris, Cookie, Sammy, and Sara.

I want to avoid my past mistakes of making the town feel so empty and encountering a villager every now and then, so with this setup I've been working on, I can finally have some nice crowds of villagers, each one with their own schedule, and little goals.

So for this next month of March, I'll be working on the development of the town, adding more girls so the town feels alive enough, set design, and I'll work on the player's house. This system is not yet in place, but I want the player to chose whatever house he wants as his home. Shouldn't be too hard now that my interiors and transitions are defined, but I'll see...

Not a lot to say regarding final observations... I'm generally happy with the progress I've made, tho I feel I could be faster... well, things should be better now with systems set in place and whatnot.

Regardless...

As always thanks for your continuous support. Hope you guys are doing fine. I'll keep you posted 🫂