blockbench: mini goals

[kradeelav]

for my next party trick in blockbench …. i actually set myself several mini goals!

personally find myself responding to projects with both harder, larger coals and smaller shorter sprint goals, so I can switch gears between the two given bandwidth on any one night. it’s something i found was super necessary making zines/comics/FALKE/work projects etc, and it’s paying off here.

ONE: build what i’m calling “distance cubes” that give myself a way to build test maps quickly with accurate, standardized distances.

First saw this concept on the same test map used in both wind waker and super mario sunshine; it’s pretty obvious that the devs used these maps as a way to test random objects, to test distances and heights (whether mario/link would make the jump/climb/edge grab, to test how far they could swim), and to test animations or weird gameplay nuances like rope leaps, double jumps, wall jumps, whatever.

I really loved the “proportion” of the levels in both games and other than FE9, know them like the back of my own hand. (fun fact, SMSS was my very first console game i played!)  kind of makes it a no brainer to gank a very useful prototyping tool that fits the “language” of these games!  Modeled the same 1x1m, 2x2m, 4x4m, 10x10m and the colors too:

Anyway, pretty sure i did literally everything wrong making these cubes LOL; I tried to repeat the steps in this tutorial that looked super cool as far as creating repeatable tile patterns but couldn’t get the pattern to repeat on all sides of the cube. whatever, simply copy pasting the UV’s onto each other did the trick and i learned how to rotate the UV face too lolol. durrr.

this is done as of tonight ~

TWO: to build a test dummy character with very basic walking animations, but with no textures/polygons. this blocky test dummy’s purely going to exist to crash test (har har) several mini things:

• how roughly to build a “normal/base” proportional character with arms and legs and joints
• how to put bones in it to animate it for very basic movements
• how to export that (and the sandbox i made last post) and whether i need to park it in blender in order to convert it to something godot accepts, or if i can go straight into godot.
• and lastly, to confirm that the dummy character can like actually, move, on the sandbox when i hit the arrow keys.

there’s a lot that can go wrong here and i’m fairly sure i’m going to have to retrace at least one of these steps XD but if all of this happens then that’s technically, the first real alpha-build of ‘holy shit krad you can make and ship an interactive 3D game from start to finish’. everything after that is just aesthetic/gameplay optimizations.

THREE: aaand as promised, to test fully rendered low-poly characters, textures and all. this one’s going to be a beast even with me sketching out approximate polygonal locations with colors, and i’m going to wait until I’m happy with the dummy’s proportions at minimum before I attempt this one. (that way if i completely fuck up the animation/process on the dummy, i won’t have to redo an enormous amount of work.)

that said, did i ever show off the fact i got my ripped zihark .obj file working in blender about a month ago when i was proof-of-concept testing how the hell UV’s worked at all ? 😛

actually got the textures working on him too but forgot to screenshot it cuz it’s on my work computer lol

I don’t see myself using this model both b/c i want to say i created all of my own textures/polygons, and also it’d feel kind of …. weird …. getting my hands so dirty with something so, idk, reverent official? it’d feel like i was mixing streams, between fanart/fic/models versus That, which feels like it solely belongs on the TV screen with the wii as a the connective tissue and all. (whatever, i’m superstitious.)

i’m going a little slower tonight and i need to catch up on sleep after staying up wayyy too late consecutively with GAMEDEV MARATHONS but them’s the plans~

also have some extra thinkythoughts on why this might be the next big thing for me:

musin' a little bit on some of the mediums/skills i subconsciously put extra points in, so to speak - body language and exploring levels as two.

you could make a pretty solid case that given weird frankenstein joint issues i physically can't make a lot of "normal"" gestures most folks can > cue me aggressively bonin' up on drawing body language to make sure characters gesticulating didn't feel off. neither is wrong, just cool to see me intentionally overcompensating there in hindsight lol.

the game levels isn't obvious regarding my drawing (yet) as much as enjoying games versus live action anything, but i was definitely enamored with games as a vehicle to explore versus irl being physically stuck to anything paved/hardwood floors (eg, houses) lol. (i also got into anime purely b/c they were the first shows that were consistently subtitled re: hearing).

as we all know, the best creativity comes with limitations ~

anyway SUPER excited for this gamedev spree given this. :D