Finally: The fourth player character!

Hi!

Guess what! We're finished with all of our player characters, at last. Introducing Sal:

Sal by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

He's a stout, and he's the most playful and light-hearted of the characters. He loves collecting things, so he occupies quite a lot of space during their adventures.
Since all of the main characters are done, we are going to get started on building levels, along with making all the animations the characters need for movement. (Geril's doing most of the animations, I (Lussy) am doing the background objects so I can get better at 3D modeling)

We also tried out Sketchfab's new feature: uploading animations! This feature is going to come in handy, because this way, we don't have to make videos to show you guys animations, and you can even rotate the models while watching. A big thanks to all of Sketchfab's staff for making our life easier!

You can view the animation here:

Beat animation test by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

GIF:

The 3rd playable character: Beat!

Hi!

It's been a long time, again. We've been working hard on creating the remaining two player characters. The first one to be completed was the Beatrice, the mouse:

Beat by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

She's not the best fighter, but she's into science and medicine. You've already seen her in a comic, but now she finally has a 3D body, too.

We were experimenting with her hair for quite a while before we got to this point. We mostly used hair meshes until now, so making strands work properly was something new. Unreal 4 helped with that. The other challenge was the tail: it still appears a bit... crooked. It's not broken though! It just needs a lot of bones...
For the skin texture, I tried out Blender's texture paint for the first time, and it made texturing a lot easier. I only did touch-ups in Gimp, when it was almost complete. (By the way, Geril did the 3D model and textures for the clothes, Lussy made the face and body textures, where skin is showing)

(These in-progress pictures were made with Blender's cycles render)

We were working on the two remaining characters simultaneously, so this means you can look forward to seeing the final character really soon! After that, we can hopefully concentrate on game mechanics and level design. I'm especially looking forward to making multiplayer work.


Until then!

3D comic #2!

Hey!

Here is the second 3D comic we made:

Being Superior by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

I think for now we'll stick with these (as they are more convenient to make and we are low on team members), but you can expect more traditional comic strips somewhere in the future.

This comic gives you more information about Cole's character. We were experimenting with sound effects (written, of course), 3D text, camera angles and facial expressions. There are some other things, too - I wonder if you'll be able to find them!

About the project; we're moving forward, slow but steady. I (Lussy) am working on textures, which means the two playable characters that only existed in drawings will soon be ready for animating and then importing into Unreal 4. Geril's doing the comics and other models while I'm messing around with the textures. Alex is still knee-deep in the engine itself (IKs! Yaaaaaaaaay).

Until next time!

3D comics!

Hi!

We spent a lot of time doing a new type of comic on Sketchfab. You have to click through the annotations to read it properly. Like this, in the lower-right corner:

We recommend full screen to see it better.

On non-widescreen (4:3) monitors, you may not be able to see all of the text, because we optimized the comic for widescreen monitors. You can move the camera with the right mouse button to see all the bubbles.

Enjoy!

Stargazing by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Sketchfab!

Spring already!

We spent the Easter holidays (and the rest of the time, too) working. All of the 4 characters are slowly becoming functional, and we’re discovering more and more possibilities in Unreal 4 (though it already killed one of our laptops…).

Alex is working on a pickup system that is going to be very important in the game, as the players will be switching weapons frequently. We have two functional characters so we can also begin to test the local multiplayer elements soon. (And there will be a video of it.)

About the comic… It’s really late, we know. It’s going slowly because the 4th character’s design is still being worked on. But we joined Sketchfab, so in the meantime you can look at our 3D models in all their glory!

Cole_v25 by carpaintergeril on Sketchfab

Other ones will be uploaded to: https://sketchfab.com/carpaintergeril

March update

Hi! I'm Lussy.

...It's been a while..
I got home from Korea a little while ago, so I'm still jetlagged and grumpy. But being there helped my mental health a lot, so now I'm ready to dive into work again. ...I mean, I would be but I have a few months of school left, so until I graduate, I don't think I'll have much time for anything... Finals. Sigh.

So while I was away and wasn't paying attention, Geril found a REAL programmer for our project. An actual programmer who can actually program AND actually DOES program. Not procrastinate. So yeah! As I still have very little grasp on what's going on, I'll just let our new programmer tell you how the project's doing. If everything works out though, I'll be able to switch back to the role of a designer and texture(/3dmodel/background/everything else related) artist soon. And I'm really looking forward to that.

***

Hi! I'm Alex,

I'm the new programmer for this project. I can also help out with German and Italian translations if we decide to include them in the game.

I hope you'll like the videos we make about the game, its features and maybe some of its funny glitches. I joined this project because I liked the story behind it and I want to be a part of this 'game-dev-gamers' team.

What I'm working on right now is some basic movement, and functions for blueprints. I'm still trying to get used to Unreal's hierarchy.

Hopefully with me on the team the rest of us don't have to get involved in the blueprint madness too much, so we can speed up the project a little bit.

What I aim to work on soon, but still don't know how exactly, are some grab functions and fluid character movement to make the gameplay look awesome.
I hope you will enjoy my videos and updates on the project.

***

PS: March's comic may be a little late, but it's already in process,
PPS: It looks like we'll be migrating to Unreal 4.

Unreal 4!

Hi!

This month is a little crowded.

We are happy to say that we managed to get hold of Unreal Engine 4 for a while (thank you, GitHub!!). So these days we are trying out the engine, discovering the differences, etc. There are lots of built-in stuff in UE4 that we would have needed in the UDK. So we're looking at the pros and cons, and considering migrating our project. We're not sure yet though. I have yet to check out the blueprint system in-depth. (By the way, scripting is so much quicker with the graphical interface and in-engine compiler. No more restarting while adjusting a variable. Yay!)

Here are some pictures for comparison! Every texture and mesh is the same as they were used in the UDK. Only minor changes at most.

Left side - UDK, right side - UE4

---

Super detailed bump maps! Yay!

Geril created this "building" in about 15 minutes.

Real-time reflections make everyone look like T-1000s in liquid metal form

If we do decide to migrate the project, we'll make some tutorials.

I'm sorry to say that there may not be a comic this month at all. Geril is hard at work at his full-time job, and in UE4 too, and I (Lussy) am traveling in South Korea at the moment. I hope you can understand.