Models and languages
Sorry for the delay. It’s been a busy week.
I’ve been waiting to see if our 3D modeler could finish the new player model in time so I could get better renders, but since that seems unlikely to happen I will simply show you what we have at the moment.
This is the front view of our new player model with some clothes layers on. Personally, I really like this style. The head of the model will be a little bit wider and a little bit shorter in the final version.
To give you some perspective here is a render of the naked player model from different angle. You can see the shape of the head and how the arms rest in their down position.
The skin is probably pretty much how it’s going to be in the final version except tha the ears are missing and the final model will have 3D hair and 3D facial hair which you can customize. The poor guy probably won’t have genitals by default, but you can give us feedback on that regard. Perhaps a leaf covering his parts would be funny and appropriate? Decisions, decisions...
At the moment it looks like our final player model will be made in this style with 97% certainty.
We have also decided that for the most part the Rituals of the old will be colored with solid colors instead of pixel textures. It should give the game a very interesting and fresh look. If you didn’t quite understand what I mean by this you can take another look at the first picture that I posted above. The player character is stylized and colored in that way - simple, strong, yet elegant.
One important consideration in this decision was that simple 3D designs will make it much easier for players to do custom skins and custom items, weapons and armor.
Changes in personel
In other news, I’m sorry to say that kosshi has left our team. He simply didn’t have enough time on his hands after his other projects and IRL.
If you are an experienced java programmer who knows intimately about making 3D games with java/JME/lwjgl/opengl and the theory behind octrees and svo raycasting or just plain voxel games in general are familiar to you, please contact me. We can’t afford to pay you anything at this point, but if that doesn’t matter and you’re interested in our project - let me know.
We can do this with just one coder - so don’t worry - the project is not in trouble. But two experienced coders would give us some freedom and possibly (but not necessarily) speed up the development.
Languages
I’ve also been busy creating one of the three languages the Rituals of the old will eventually have. Here is the language of the people (the name is a work in progress). This will be the language most used in the game.
If you look at the image below you’ll see see that first you have your rune, then you have the letter of the alphabet which corresponds to the rune on your keyboard, then you have the name of the rune and finally it’s meaning.
Sorry about the poor image quality. Something happens to the image when I upload it and it gets all blurry.
The final language will have some 500 - 3000 words. At the moment we are looking into if we could get them all recorded by voice actors. It was not on our feature list but we were contacted by enthusiastic volunteers who wanted to do it. Currently there’s no guarantee of what the quality would be like. If the quality is bad we will simply have to drop the voice acting from our feature list. But it’s something that I’m very interested in.
Easier way to do it could be just recording grunts which express different kinds of moods. It’s also something we might consider.
Overall the languages will be very simple, ie. “sky fire” = “the sun”, “sky fire darkness eat” = “the sun is setting and it is getting late, would you like to have a cup of tea before we go to bed?” and so on. That last one was a joke but you get the general idea.
Knowing the languages will be completely optional fun, but if you want to you should be able to learn the basics pretty fast. The grammar will be very simple or nonexistent.
New web pages
Oh, we also have new web pages. They are still pretty much a work in progress but they are already looking much better than the old ones so I pressed the big red “Publish! (please check if you’re drunk)” button. We are still missing a proper logo, some art work, sketches and well - of course - renders and screenshots. But we’ll get to that eventually.
The new web pages should be more mobile friendly.
Forum theme
We also have a new forum theme which should make the forums more user friendly and mobile friendly. It’s all very basic and in need of tweaking but it’s currently on the bottom of my TODO list.
It will have to do for now.
If you have any questions or feedback please use our forums or try to catch us on our Discord server. See you there.
I will try to post a new status update in a week or so. Hopefully by then we will have some more amazing renders of the player models and concept art of the game world itself.
Until next time.
This article was updated on 20/10/18 @ 11:10