Hi there,
Last month we introduced redwig.studio through our first blog post. This month we talk about what we have been working on during these last days. Let’s time for Redwig news!
Monkey Fortress
Joris
We achieved a big challenge for us, animating our character with his animations, his model/skeleton, and his animgraph, without using a single element of Terry (playermodel from s&box). It was not easy and we were not particularly well helped. We were often criticized for complicating our task by not taking the s&box skeleton. Indeed, we want to do everything from A to Z, it may not be perfect at first, but it will be done by us. Hence the importance of developing an MVP.
The difficulty of an MVP (minimum viable product) is knowing when to stop. We take a lot of time to optimize everything we do, sometimes we work 2 weeks on a feature that requires 1 week of work because it’s not enough perfect for us.
Playermodel:
Previously I was talking about the playermodel. I have completely reworked our playermodel (Archibaldys) in sculpt and retopology. The first playermodel was too much amateurish.
Our character has about fifty animations and more than a hundred shapekeys. We want to implement shortly the possibility of creating his monkey.
I also created several textures for his eyes as well as his fur.
Maps:
There is a lot of work on the maps, it is difficult to be on all fronts at the same time.
The mf_spacechimp map needs a total rework. She lacks optimization. This is why this map is benched and why we have embarked on the creation of a new grey boxing map that we are testing and optimizing as we go.
Pol
I still discover many facets of video games as a whole. There are a lot of features that I had never touched before:
Master the art of the player controller from A to Z. Our Archibaldys is inspired by the movements of Counter-Strike. And to tell the truth, Terry’s controller is also based on cstrike.
Orchestrate our dear Archibaldys with the help of animgraph. At first sight, Terry’s animgraph terrifies me. But starting from scratch allowed me to understand the logic and now we have beautiful fusions of animations.
Create a cinematic camera. We want to make our game a bit more spectacular, so we wanted to have a cinematic camera for every starting game.
Getting started with voxel constructions. Destroying walls is good, but making holes in them is even better. We get satisfaction from punching holes in walls, a bit like Rainbow Six Siege or Teardown. We think it will add a new dimension to our game. I can’t wait to try this with several players.
Experimenting with shaders: I still have a lot to learn about shaders, but I managed to create a grid that serves as a marker for the construction mode.
In terms of features marked as “to be improved”, I worked on the interface, in particular on the Scoreboard. In particular, there was the spraying of weapons using the famous Lerp() method to make the rendering smooth.
To conclude on my part, I still learned a lot. And I guess I have a lot to learn. I know that all of this could apply to other game engines like Unreal Engine: the tool will be different but the logic remains the same.
In the future, I will intensify my efforts on the in-game currency system, the improvement of weapon sprays, the end game, the interface, the atmosphere and the sound effects (with the help of Joris). So a lot of small details will contribute to the general experience of Monkey Fortress.
To summarize Redwig news :
Our common objective with Joris is to master all aspects of video game creation, which is why we proceed with our hands dirty from scratch, without using Terry. Of course we are inspired by what was done by Facepunch, but we are starting from scratch to fully understand the logic behind it.
We plan to present the MVP of Monkey Fortress at the end of December 2022, so we are working on the main mechanics to offer players a first experience for our game. The feedback will be important and will allow us to better project ourselves into the future for Monkey Fortress.
Gvarados Game Jam
To close this first devblog, we inform you that we are participating in the sandbox Gvarados Game Jam.
For our next redwig news, we will provide an in-depth review of our experience. Because it’s our first game jam!
If you read this article before Sunday, October 30, don’t forget to watch Gvarados live which presents all the s&box games that were made during the conquest, from October 21 to 29, 2022!
May the best game win 🎃