Vancouver Stuff!

MiniComi 2025 and AniRevo 2025 are coming up!! I will be at both!! Selling prints, stickers, and merch. I will have new prints, new stickers, and more backstock of Ascari plushes. If you're in the area or will be attending either events, come say hi and buy some stuff!!

The Creature

We really gotta figure out a name for this thing, man. We had one pretty locked in until I saw that another game on Steam had the same name (and it's an indie game, I don't want to step on toes). I thought I had settled on one a bit ago to replace that but the more I've sat with it, the more I've realised it's not really fitting to the atmosphere of the thing we're making. I'm glad Nat was there to immediately be, like, "idk doesn't click immediately" because sometimes I get so confident in my own ideas that I can't see past the immediate novelty of an idea or execution, and end up making something I'm not really happy with in the end.

Anyways. I've spent the last bit working on a bunch of stuff for the game! As some of you have seen on Bluesky, we have an enemy now!'

This is my first attempt at modeling a character in 3D, so he understandably looks really crappy. I'm not happy with it at all but the process of making him taught me enough that I know how to move forward with whatever our actual enemies will look like, which I haven't taken much of a decision on.

I was talking about this with Nat a few days ago but it ties into a larger conversation we've had over the course of making this thing, in that like... this started as a pretty direct "we're making Marathon because Bungie won't" kinda thing. Since then, we've had the (thankfully) good sense to move away from that and make something really inspired by those games and what makes them special to play still but also making something that's uniquely "us". The story has taken a bit of a rework as a result and so has some art direction stuff.

With that, I've had to take a think about what the enemies would even look like because there aren't aliens and fighting cops is boring. (Although, morally correct.) You're obviously gonna be fighting the station's security forces but how can we make that cool, and more importantly, fun? Shooting guys in Call of Duty is pretty mind-numbing in the long-run because they're just guys who move the same. It's an expensive carnival shooting gallery, which is fine when you approach it that way. What makes the combat in Marathon or Halo so fun isn't the weird aliens but also that they have really varied shapes, sizes, and behaviors. You know how an Elite fights, you know how a Jackal fights, you know how the S'pht fight, and a combat scenario that mixes and matches that to subvert you and challenge you is what's made Bungie games so smart and fun to play to this day. (And why, frankly, I'm really worried about Marathon 2025's wholesale commitment to player enemies.)

So if we're designing security guys... how do you make that interesting? Like, visually. I still have no idea, frankly. We're deep enough in now that it's become a little daunting to realise how many hats we have to wear.

All that to say that, I haven't gotten to designing anyone in the enemy faction yet lol. I've been thinking about it here and there. The two spaces my brain has been going to a lot is JSRF's Rokkaku Police and FFXII's Judges. The Rokkaku Cops have such a distinct language and visible threat heirarchy while still being very, like, "grounded" for that setting. FF12's judges I think are just really aspirational for having one type of character in that game who's armor goes fuckass wild. All they have to do is stand there to symbolize the authority and threat they possess. I want the enemies in the game to look believably situated in this world and location but I also don't want to paint myself into a corner and make something unbelievably generic for the sake of fitting in, you know? Why can't the enemies, just, look crazy? Why can't they have weird ass helmets or crazy armor or whatever. Who cares!

It'll come with time but it's just a matter of getting myself out of the headspace where I'm trying to mimic Bungie's "everything explained through lore" thing. They're masters of worldbuilding and have had an incredible ability to make the wildest things make sense. But Nat and I are two people and I have never written a serious project at this scale before. I can't hold myself to the same standard!! I gotta do what feels right, I think.

Textures

Man, figuring out textures has been fun.

There's still a lot of work to do (AND A LOT OF WALLS TO TEXTURE) and that doesn't include any of the props we'll eventually put into place but I'm really happy with where things are going.

Trenchbroom's tools allows for really quick cutting and editing of tiles ("brushes") that allows for a lot of really fun trim sheet-style texturing. I approached this first way too rigidly I think and was having a really tough time but I feel so much more confident in it now, it's great. Some of the lighting in areas hasn't been updated so it looks a lot flatter than other areas do (and I haven't assigned new material properties for some textures so they still render as flat/without any specular highlights and stuff) but our game looks more like an actual-ass game by the day. It's exciting!!

The textures are all drawn at 40px/m, which after a lot of testing was the middle ground I found for "looks best at native resolution and/or stretched a bit" and "has just the right amount of pixel for detail but not enough for me to obsess over it".

The textures are going to be as shown with nonlinear/nearest filtering to keep the pixel-like look, which I fell in love with after studying some of Metal Gear Solid's models imported into Blender. All those games use linear filtering but an emulator lets you turn that stuff off and it's SO cool. I knew on the spot that it was the kind of look I wanted for the game.

I draw the textures, cut up the amazing level geometry that Nat makes in Trenchbroom, and slap that stuff on. Trenchbroom's way of handling textures isn't too unique, every engine or software has some similar way of handling tiling and textures but Trenchbroom is so lightweight that you can make a whole area come to life in minutes. It's really cool.

In the screenshot above, I cut the geometry up in a bunch of sections and applied various textures that are then squished into the right proportions. Some of them, I make sure they are 1:1 but some I stretch and squish for what feels right. Our environments are pretty big in scale so I'm sectioning everything in a way to make sure it believably looks like a constructed world. It doesn't need to make a TON of sense, just enough so it doesn't look like a DOOM wad or something y'know?

That's mostly been the stuff taking up my time. I need to get back to writing so I don't forget that this thing is supposed to have a story. I also need to put in the time and learn animation which... I'm not gonna lie, I am kind of dreading. I just don't know if I had the skillset for it and, maybe more importantly, I worry that it's one hat too many. We're not using any asset store stuff for this at the moment, everything is built from scratch, which is really invigorating but also makes me really understand why so many "SOLO DEVS" shortcut their way through things like character/prop animation.

It would be really nice to have any kind of sense that the industry was healthy enough to look for money for this thing. Nat is still looking for work and the stress of that sucks to deal with.

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