Painting the Madness – Dev Blog 74
The Void has been getting a texture upgrade this week. I’ve spent a lot of time in GIMP and going cross-eyed while trying to work out the fine art of pixel work. It’s gone well, and I’m pretty happy with the results I’ve been producing.
Something that has been mentioned by a few people was how the voxel textures hare very high definition compared to all the other textures in the game. Which is somewhat immersion breaking. So I’ve been re-making textures it a more “blocky” style in order to try and sort this out. So let’s take a before and after look at some rock.
The new texture is on the left, the old texture on the right. Compared to the texture on the door, the old texture doesn’t match the art style at all – whereas the new one does. I’ve been converting a lot of textures to this new art style, and it’s one of these little changes that makes a huge difference to the look and the feel of the game. Note: all the textures I’ve created don’t have normal maps yet. This is something I will be adding later. This is mostly because I want to use the normal maps to allow for dynamic snow build up via a shader.
Here you can see lavarite next to wood. The lavarite was an interesting challenge – the actual pattern on it is based on a 10×10 grid, whereas all these new textures are 32×32. So it involved some jiggery-pokery to keep the pattern the same – also I am incredibly happy with how the wood came out.
This texture was my favourite (and the hardest) to create. Bismuthinite – a metal that is sought-after in Fringe Planet for it’s magical propertise. It’s an incredibly beautiful mineral in real life, looking very alien and colourful (check out some pictures here).
There is still a long way to go, but incredibly happy with how these new textures (though technically a downgrade) are changing the feel of the game, making the experience a lot more cohesive.
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: