Note : Godot 3.2.1, Blender 2.83, Gimp 2.10.18.
Things have been going very slowly, these past couple of months.
Starting in March, we've had a whole slew of ever changing and expanding impositions on our daily lives,
all in the name of 'Combatting The Virus'.
And my autistic brain doesn't do very well with perceived injustices. It gets fixated
on what's wrong and what can be done about it. Not good for productivity ...
In August, we also had a heat wave to deal with (well, it's still too hot to do much of anything, really). If the coolest place in the house is 27 degrees C for multiple days in a row ... No. That's another thing my autistic brain can't deal with.
So, yeah. Not much stuff to talk about, game dev wise.
I've worked a bit on the inside of the castle. I've created the rough outlines for the
castle wings (4 floors each). I still need to decide on how the levels will be split up into rooms,
but that should become clearer as I start working on puzzles.
I also tried my hand at creating a suit of armor ... (a rather painful experience 🙂), an
old mirror, and a chest.
So, let's look at some pictures.
Remember : there's no lighting yet (I will postpone that until Godot 4.0),
and most of the 'decorative stuff' will be created when I start working on the puzzles ...
And since I have nothing else to show, here's a close-up of the chest and mirror 🙂 :
As you can probably tell, I have no modeling experience.
As such, this part of the game development process is very slow.
I find it difficult to come up with interesting (yet simple) shapes. Also, finding textures
that match, and fit in with the atmosphere that I'm trying to create doesn't come easily.
I'm also trying to keep everything fairly low-poly/low-resolution.
Let's see what I have imported into Godot so far ...
I have 49 textures (that actually surprises me), most of which are 1K (also some 512 KB).
They usually come as a diffuse/normal map pair, but sometimes I also needed to add a roughness map.
I'm currently using 28 materials.
The project size is now 1.2 GB, but there's still a bunch of junk in there from previous
tests (including textures). I don't actually know if this is a resonable size or not (at this
point in the development).
Another thing I should mention, is that I have changed my workflow a bit.
I still model everything in Blender, and also create my materials there (to see how
things look, and also to have a reference/backup). However, before I export to glTF 2.0 (I use
'separate'), I change
all materials used in a particular model to a 'default' material (no textures, grey color).
Next, I copy all textures manually into a 'tx' folder under my Godot import folder.
I then manually copy the 2 glTF files into the Godot import folder.
I can then quickly recreate the materials in Godot and store them in a 'mat' folder under the Godot import folder.
The reasons I have started using this workflow are :
1) exporting models with materials and textures using the glTF exporter is painful. It is
slow and error prone. Most of the time, I had to retry several times to get everything into Godot.
2) project organisation is more flexible : I now have 1 folder for all textures, and 1
folder for all materials. This makes reusing textures and materials very easy.
So. I think this is all I have to say for now.
Progress has been slow, and none of the 3d models are 'perfect',
but, I'm actually feeling proud and happy when I look back at what I've accomplished so far.
I quite like the feeling 'my' castle evokes. It feels like a quiet, happy place.
A place with history. A place I wouldn't mind living in ...