What I’ve been at in November

To be honest, I didn’t put that much of my spare time into game development in November due to mainly two reasons:

  • My children
  • DOTA 2

Yeah, that’s unfortunately right. I got into playing this MOBA – never tried a game of this genre before – and basically wasted a lot of my spare time in November to it (It’s pretty good from a gamedesign/balancing perspective but also with a pretty steep learning curve). Anyway, that game inspired me to try something out which is more gamedev related.

For some time now I wanted to give modelling in Blender a try. And since there is the possibility to create some nice visual equipment stuff for DOTA 2 I even had an interesting test case. So I decided to make something for the hero Lich. In the picture you can see the progress I’ve made so far.

Technically interesting from the gamedev perspective is how Valve’s Source engine interprets different shader masks. That is what is still missing in my specific case – to author the color channels of the two shader masks to let the engine now where reflective, etc. material is.

Blender itself was not that difficult to get into. Not as difficult as I’ve read and heard beforehand from different sources. So I can put this experience under some gamedev progress at least :).

For painting the textures I also invested some (little) money into this tool:

Do you spot the dust? Yeah, haven’t used it for one or two weeks :(.

Quite a great tool for precise control in painting stuff digitally. This also comes in quite handy for future gamedev projects fitting the hand-painted style of my prevoius games. Finally what am I up to next?

  • Finish that DOTA 2 equipment, just as a test case (and to get something done with this)
  • Learn some new tools for gamedev (Unity 3D, or Haxe NME) by making a new game
  • Continue development and finalize my game Bottlecolonies

Expect some more updates in December.