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Game Dev - 1 hour asset challenge part 1
2 years ago
I decided to try a challenge based on the advice I talked about in the previous post. If you missed it, the advice is this.
1- No single asset should take more than one hour to male, preferably less.
2- There should be a small number of textures used for almost everything.
To this end, I created three texture atlases using an online tool. The textures I used are Screaming Brain’s Tiny Texture Packs. It covers a broad range of general textures like wood, metal, stone, and grass. Numbering almost 500 in total.
That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the advice never said what a “small number” is, and many of the textures are similar or things I’ll likely never use. Eg. There are 25 variants of “grass”, and 24 “terrain” textures that are views of islands and countryside.
I’ve scaled the textures down from 128x128 to 32x32 to make working with them easier and keep the PS1 look I want. I can scale them up later.
With that done, it’s time for ideation.
After some thinking, considering some options and rejecting others, I ultimately settled on remaking (or reattempting) my failed horror FPS project from last year. It’s a horror FPS set in the maintenance tunnels for an underground train.
However, many of the same problems I had on that project are still a problem now. Mainly, getting enemy animations to work. Something that will be worse given I have to model, rig, and animate, all in a one hour time limit. It’s just not feasible.
I have a few ideas for dealing with this. Having mechanical enemies so they can be animated with code (which is cheating), or brute forcing it via blender and automatic weights (pushing the time limit and would look bad). But the tactic I’m settling on is having the enemies be 2D animated sprites. It’ll look weird, but it’s the option that makes the most sense.
I made the player’s primary weapon, a nail gun, in 35 minutes and it looks …bad. But it’s recognizable.
Next step is more planning. I want to lay out the game’s levels. Once I have that I can model rooms and assets. I think I can save some time here. Most of the rooms will be concrete hallways, and most detail items like barrels, crates, and toolboxes should be easy to create. Still a lot of work to go after that but one step at a time.
1- No single asset should take more than one hour to male, preferably less.
2- There should be a small number of textures used for almost everything.
To this end, I created three texture atlases using an online tool. The textures I used are Screaming Brain’s Tiny Texture Packs. It covers a broad range of general textures like wood, metal, stone, and grass. Numbering almost 500 in total.
That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the advice never said what a “small number” is, and many of the textures are similar or things I’ll likely never use. Eg. There are 25 variants of “grass”, and 24 “terrain” textures that are views of islands and countryside.
I’ve scaled the textures down from 128x128 to 32x32 to make working with them easier and keep the PS1 look I want. I can scale them up later.
With that done, it’s time for ideation.
After some thinking, considering some options and rejecting others, I ultimately settled on remaking (or reattempting) my failed horror FPS project from last year. It’s a horror FPS set in the maintenance tunnels for an underground train.
However, many of the same problems I had on that project are still a problem now. Mainly, getting enemy animations to work. Something that will be worse given I have to model, rig, and animate, all in a one hour time limit. It’s just not feasible.
I have a few ideas for dealing with this. Having mechanical enemies so they can be animated with code (which is cheating), or brute forcing it via blender and automatic weights (pushing the time limit and would look bad). But the tactic I’m settling on is having the enemies be 2D animated sprites. It’ll look weird, but it’s the option that makes the most sense.
I made the player’s primary weapon, a nail gun, in 35 minutes and it looks …bad. But it’s recognizable.
Next step is more planning. I want to lay out the game’s levels. Once I have that I can model rooms and assets. I think I can save some time here. Most of the rooms will be concrete hallways, and most detail items like barrels, crates, and toolboxes should be easy to create. Still a lot of work to go after that but one step at a time.
