karne-game

[karne-game]

i am not a “content creator.” i am a weird faggot on the internet

[karne-game]

Engines Galore

While Godot is and will be my engine of choice for the project, for now, I am also going to take some time to evaluate other potential engines.

The reason for this is, that i want to use specific tooling such as in-engine vertex painting and C#-Scripting if possible.

Fortunately, the list of engines that seem to fulfill all of my requirements seems to be rather short.

One engine i am specifically looking at is FlaxeEngine since its payment/royalty model is agreeable enough for me while being lightweight and easy enough to work with while also providing a lot of the features i'd like to use for prototyping. The only thing i might dearly miss is the automatic import of .blend files.

Otherwise, development has been slow-going and has mostly been about updating and expanding the documentation and internal roadmap as well as some redesigning and simplification of mechanics.

[karne-game]

Still working;

Just want to put this out there, the project is currently in a bit of a suspension.

I am still working on parts of it in the background. it's just nothing that i can/want to actually show.

[karne-game]

Building a whole new world;

Heyho!

I had a few things get in my way but i am still working in the background.

Currently I am still figuring out how to optimize the automatic export from Blender to Godot.

Godot offers the ability to add certain suffixes to objects in blender to automatically process tasks during import. for example, you can add the "-col" suffix so Godot automatically generates a collision mesh for the object. You can read more about that here.

Since the current plan is to have one single, continuous world i want to build the levels as children of area meshes/collisions that detect when a player enters them and activate/show the rest of the node children. A sort of area based object culling.

That way i can stuff an entire zone into one blender file and don't need to juggle as much data later on.

[karne-game]

HuMaNoId?!;

Modelling more stuff in blender. Took a bit of time today and really sat down to pin down a decent base figure i can use to model all the games characters.

Swords not included they're just there for the money shot *fingerguns*

Also, i've been thinking to start streaming my processes. That migth help me to stay productive on slower days.

[karne-game]

HuMaNoId?!;

Modelling more stuff in blender. Took a bit of time today and really sat down to pin down a decent base figure i can use to model all the games characters.

Swords not included they're just there for the money shot *fingerguns*

Also, i've been thinking to start streaming my processes. That migth help me to stay productive on slower days.

[karne-game]

HuMaNoId?!;

Modelling more stuff in blender. Took a bit of time today and really sat down to pin down a decent base figure i can use to model all the games characters.

Swords not included they're just there for the money shot *fingerguns*

Also, i've been thinking to start streaming my processes. That migth help me to stay productive on slower days.

[karne-game]

Hihi

I did a few things!

Most of them are things i can't really show but i will try to summarize for those interested:

I have been cleaning up my project structure to make more of my materials and objects reusable.

I have also started to look into blender asset libraries and other options to move the entire level-layout and design process into blender itself.

Might see about importing custom properties from blender to godot as metadata. If i have to modify the importer myself, so be it.

Now to the visual aspects.

First of all, and even more noodle-ous caverns.

Materials with transparency from Blender straight into Godot. A little inscription in this case. (still need to animate the fire for the torches)

you'll definitely see more of these caves. I will use them to test and implement most of the basic features of the game.

Though, once i have more or less finalized my design pipeline i might show off more sections.

[karne-game]

Initial Texturing; SkyBox;

Adding some basic texture just adds so much more personality to the place and the surrounding skybox just really brings it together.

The feeling of being inside a gigantic cavern system.

Nutty Putty cave got nothing on this bad boy. Here you are going down into the insta-death-void and straight into super turbo hell or something like that.

I am not striving for ultra realistic lighting, i honestly just want the game to have a "mood". It also makes the game run real good.

Definitely want to mute the textures of the pillars a little bit before.

Next goals:

Figuring out a decent pipeline to add texture painting to the world geometry. Probably just going to assign an extra material to the necessary faces and paint on top of the ground layer.

Figuring out how to add performant but decent looking lighting in the level to give it more visual texture and to use it as a guide for players

[karne-game]

Learned about Array and Curve modifiers;

Of course, the first thing i thought about making is a spine that also acts as a little bit of interesting platforming.

I also added a little shrine/altar area for more environmental storytelling (this is an example of locations that will also feature on-screen flavor text. Either as an interactable or triggered on proximity.

[karne-game]

Learning to make environments;

First real post on here, huh?

You hear a lot of discussion about modelling envionments by hand but it's honestly not that bad? Might be due to the low-poly nature?

We love starting-zone jumping puzzles in this house. Gotta give the player immediately stuff to explore.

Is that a hidden path, barred from the player's immediate vision? It just might be!

The maw of a gigantic skull leading into a deeper cave system? How original!

A cave entrance far off the main path? What ever could hide inside there?

Anyway, the almost 1:1 import from Blender files as Godot scene files is an incredibly satisfying workflow.

[karne-game]

Hello Karne;

This blog will exist exclusively to document the development on my game, Karne.

Karne is planned to be a 3D RPG of sorts, grabbing design elements that i personally enjoy in those types of games and combining them in the most solo-dev-friendly way i can.

One important feature i want to personally improve upon is the turn-based combat.

The motto will be "Turn based doesn't have to mean boring or tedious."

If that already sparked your interest, keep reading!

I have already created rough prototypes earlier this year so i am rather confident about the direction i want to go in.

Most of the concepts for locations, characters and the overarching story have already been completed so that type of content may be sparse but i am thinking about sprinkling in some of them from time to time.

Regarding the tools i will be using, they're a mixed bunch of paid and open source softwares.

Godot (specifically the .Net branch) will be my gameengine for this project. Originally i planned to use Unity3D but ... well, you know.

Blender will be used for the creation and composition of 3D assets.

Affinity Designer will be used for most 2D assets, including but not limited to: UI Elements, Sprites, Logos, Rendered World-Space Text (in combination with blender)

Clip Studio Paint will be used for sprite animations and animated "cinematics".

JetBrains Rider will used for all of the programming/scripting work.

And last but not least Reaper will be my digital audio workstation (DAW) of choice.

Did i list all of these just to add the appropriate tags? Absolutely.

But i also think it's important to provide people information that they could use as a starting point to decide on their own product stack for development.

In real life i am a C# developer for a german company but i also have a background in multimedia design and have at least a basic understanding of music theory from playing a few instruments many many years ago. That's the reason i feel confident enough to approach this kind of project. Also, i just always had fun in creating worlds to play in. I think the next logical step is to share these ideas with other people.