#reeled in polycount

[lancecharleson]

Playing Bioshock 1 again for the first time in a long while, it made me realise just how much of 7th generation gaming we take for granted.

Among all the piss-filtered dark-age talk of how so many AAA games around this time eventually became homogenously Gears of War/COD-like in order to capitalise on their success, we tend to memory hole how this generation started off with a bang with titles like this, Prey (2006), Kameo: Elements of Power, and Little Big Planet.

It was also the last time we would ever see this many original single player games with AAA backing debut in a generation, until the 2010s where said industry would start going all in on the live-service multiplayer model.

While the indie/mid-budget gaming scene has picked up the torch of continuing to bring us fantastic SP games that have themselves become legends in their own right, there's something I find truly magical about playing a SP game that, not only has a solid premise and design philosophy going on, but also has the kind of high production values that AAA can afford them.

[gokigenda4]

[Unity & Houdini Enigne] Shanty Town Technical Reel from Marina Alexandra Bade on Vimeo.

This procedural tool was developed to use any kind of mesh as an input. It runs on Houdini Engine inside Unity creating various styles of houses and cities while keeping low on polys (watch video for more info). The tool features LOD's, custom colliders, lightbaking, mesh inputs, speedtree inputs, procedural decals, low & high poly mode.

If you're interested in the making of, I'm running a Polycount thread: polycount.com/discussion/203089/unity-shanty-town