VR Designs

Snippet #27: Graphical make-over
Sorry for the long time of absence. I had a rather rough second part of 2018, don’t ask! But I am back in business and trying to catch up on lost development time. At the moment I am working on making the interface graphics in Shadow Empire more consistent and more unique (compared to my other games).

Progress is good, but it has been rather slow going with the modular graphics approach for the Troop Types. Basically each kind of troops, like Light Tanks can have a few hundred different ways it can be rendered. I have also been improving the tech tree.

Anyways I almost finished with the interface artwork phase and will then be moving to map artwork phase.

Let me share a little bit. Here are a few quick screenies from the current progress:

Just some Militia Units exploring the wastelands

The troops inside one of our Militia Units

Info on our starting Zone and its Governor

Hope to show some more snippets soon and thank you for your time!

Best wishes,
Vic

No snippet this time. I have just started on the Graphics & Interface development phase and everything is now in transition. So it is hard for me to post a screenie on what I am working on. This Graphics & Interface phase is quite a big phase, but things are progressing well and I already know this will be a huge facelift.

I am not only tackling the graphics itself, but also the way they are build. I can already disclose I am going for a modular approach for Leaders and Equipment. I figured that even if I would do a 100 or 200 unique portraits for Leaders they would quickly turn stale. So I am now trying out a 2d layered approach which seems to be working very well. This should result in thousands of clearly different faces (and well… yeah… tens of thousands of slightly different ones as well).

Tests so far show I’ll be able to implement the same method for the Model Types. Remember that every time you play the game you’ll research and then design new models, like Tanks for example. Everytime you play you’ll have different equipment. It just felt wrong if in one game you designed a ‘Puncher Light Tank’ and in another an ‘Arctus Light Tank’ that they looked exactly the same. Or if you’d upgrade the ‘Arctus’ to ‘Arctus II’ that it would visually be completely identical. The method I am working on should assure multiple dozens of quite different looks for each Model Type (and well… yeah… a hundred or more slightly different ones). Over 20 different Model Types are planned for the final game, so the total amount of looks for your military equipment should be quite impressive.

Anyways just wanted to tell I am still working hard. My apologies for not visually showing anything this post. My next snippet will probably show a first screenshot of some of the final graphics.

Best wishes,
Vic