Building solid plans

While bensku has been coding the foundation of Rituals of the old I have been trying out different kinds of ideas for the player character’s 3D model.

We tried out a short collaboration with one friend of mine to see if he could be our 3D artist, but he eventually decided that he would rather not devote so much of his time to 3D art.

I’m still hopeful that we will find someone else from our inner circle who could take up the role but if that doesn’t happen I will eventually start looking for an outsider on 3D forums and try to get them interested in the project.

Here is a current VIP player model without textures done in a blocky style:

Early character model

Here is the same model with some of the rings and clothes layers, still no textures.

Early character model

The clothes and rings that you see in the image above are basically invisible 3D layers which can be textured to add different kinds of clothes into the game. They can also be used by modders and server owners who wish to add their own stuff to the game.

You will also be able to make your own 3D models but we wanted to have an easy way to add new things for the people who don’t have 3D skills but who have sufficient skills to paint textures.

Here you can see a closeup of the right hand and the placement of the ring models:

Early character model

I’ve also been writing the base documents on our internal wiki that works as a kind of a blue print on how the game will eventually work.

These internal documents are not open to everyone because there are lots of internal stuff, messy notes, ever changing plans, questions and things like that. And they would be full of spoilers. Even though I liked the initial idea of keeping the development process open we thought it best to keep things more organized and post the juicy bits here.

I’ve been looking for several days for a good forum software that doesn’t cost an arm or a leg and is relatively easy to configure so we don’t have to spend weeks on end doing that (I’m looking at you Xenforo).

Currently I’m so much in love with Flarum but unfortunately it’s still very much in development. When they release 0.1.0, which should be their first production ready version, I’m going to be all over it.

Today I also had an idea to make a very simple introduction to Rituals of the old as an interactive web page where you could “walk around” by clicking things. Since we don’t have much art assets yet it will probably be full of text and a few quick and dirty stick figures here and there - just to show you in semi visual fashion what we have planned.

I think I will be working on that for the next couple of days. Hopefully it will be cool like the old text adventures.