Updates, Discussion, and a Tutorial!

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

I had a well deserved day off on Monday – at least that's what I'm telling myself to keep from seeming lazy. During that day off I actually did a bunch of stuff around the house to help out the family, but it was a needed break from programming and tweaking public floats in Unity to get things how I want them. A few things I added on Sunday after writing the previous article:

- Power Speed powerup no works with a time limit

- I added a dodge mechanic, a little sidewards boost

- Some movement variables were tweaked making the speed boost not so OP, by reducing normal move speed a bit, and also making movement less "slippery" feeling by increasing drag.

- Added a (temporary?) grass material to get an idea of art style

The point of this article is going to focus on the art direction I'm taking mainly, although as I get some more work done I may branch out and talk about some other things but who knows. The art style I've gone with is going to be pretty standard pixelated "old school" textures. I like the way they look, but also I think not using pretty HD textures sort of aleviates any pressures of having a super polished game. That might sound like I'm taking the easy way out, but let's face it here I'm no pro modeler or texture artist, I need all the leverage I can get. Also these kind of graphics still stand up and give the player a sense of nostalgia, and I want to stress that the biggest reason I chose to go with this style is just because it fuckin' looks good. I mean who doesn't love the look of epic low res grass? <insert grass picture> So I'm going to get started creating a brown dirty metal camo looking texture in photoshop and sort of walk you guys through how I'm making it, on the off chance I help anyone out. I'm no good with photoshop, but filters are powerful tools, especially for lower res video game texture artwork. Let's see what I can come up with! 

It's not the best looking thing I've ever seen, but it works! I doubt you'll see this in the final game, unless I'm really lazy, which is actually pretty likely. So. Yeah maybe you'll see this in the final game. Regardless, let me show you what I did to get the effect so maybe someone can take my failed attempt and make it work – just like Edison said, "I didn't fail, I just discovered how not to do it!"

I started by deleting the background layer, nobody wants that shit. I filled the screen with brown and used the difference cloud filter to get some kinda texture down on the canvas, you can really do it with any color since you'll be fine tuning the color with image>adjustments>hue and saturation (check the "colorize" box).

<hue/saturation screenshot>

Next we need some more "grit" on the image to make ower magic "convert to epic pixels" filter to be more pronounced and to add a bit more depth to the image. For this we just simply add noise, not too much, but make sure you can see it fairly well as it will not appear like noise spots anymore after our next filter. Somewhere between 2 and 4 percent should be plenty.

Our next filter pass is my favorite effect in photoshop – crystallize. It takes your image, chops it into a zillion little sections of various orientations and it makes your image look like it's straight out a cartoon. It's useful for achieving the effect of a sort of camo pattern since it has little splotches within your image's color spectrum. Set the crystallize parameter to around 6 or 7, you dont want these to be too large because the texture will end up being stretched in-game to achieve an even more retro pixelated look! It should look like this:

Our last filter pass for this layer of the image will be a mosaic filter. This just basically makes your image look like it was taken with a camera that has a resolution of 10 pixels. So basically don't use this filter unless you're deliberately trying to make your image look like garbage. I happen to love that look. Set the parameter to 4 or 5, and watch your image step back in time right to the late 80's! People say HD textures now days look good, but how much more detailed can you really get than seeing individual pixels? 

Almost done! Now we just need a bit of color depth variation. This is easy, create a new layer and make sure the background is transparent. Grab a uniquely shaped brush from the brush presets and select a dark green color and put 5 or 6 single clicks around the image, do the same with one more color like tan. Use your critical thinking skills to place the splotches spaced out around the image a bit. My second favorite filter, gaussian blur does a good job at taking these blotches and spreading them out a bit, do this to taste, and you can duplicate this layer a few times to get a desired intensity of color. I would run one more mosaic filter over this layer with the same settings as you did for the previous layer, to make the pixelation line up and look nice, and you're done! Now you have something that looks like this: 

Just to give you an idea of how simple it is to apply these techniques to other images you have made to achieve that awesome pixelated low-res texture without even being remotely good at pixel art, here's a metal texture I made for the barrel of the tank/treads, literally in like 30 seconds. I just applied a fibers filter to the image, desaturated it to make it black and white, darkened it a little in the same step, and added the mosaic filter. Straight outta Doom'pton!

So if that helped anyone (doubt it) you're welcome. I'm trying to share as much of my experience with this game as possible, and I'm not so good at remembering to screenshot/record things and remember things as I'm doing them, but hopefully I'll get better at it as I go on. I think that does it for today, I may end up expanding this greatly because as I'm writing this it's only 10:30 in the morning, and I have the rest of the day more or less to get stuff done with the game. I'll try to get another few paragraphs of updates into this article at the end of the night, as well as a brief list of things I want to get done. Spoiler alert: I want to have a playable deathmatch by the end of the week, or earlier – complete with bots! Thanks for reading!

BONUS MATERIAL :D

It's now 2:59 in the afternoon and I've gotten a few more things implemented into the game. The most exciting thing is now when you shoot at another tank, it turns into a pile of rubble and starts smoking via particle effects! You can drive into the pile of rubble and push it around a bit, which I might actually leave as a mechanic for certain game modes as a way to block off paths or slow enemy tanks from reaching a certain area...not sure. I'm going to make an effor to slow down development – not the development of the game as a whole but the development of these shooty-killy mechanics, I'm implementing them sort of quickly and with my goal for this being a multiplayer game, I don't want to overlook anything that may make it harder to start networking later on. So I'm going to take a break from those mechanics and start focusing on re-modelling and finishing some more texture work to get the visuals where I'd like them to be. This way I have a solid foundation for at least howI want the player deaths to function. I'll also need to implement some basic AI in order to test the gameplay mechanics and make sure the player dying and respawning works well. I don't want to feel overwhelmed so I think I'm going to just focus on basic deathmatch for now, with the most basic set of mechanics to have the game function...so movement, shooting, all power ups and weapon pickups, score system, round timer, win/lose/max score reached type of thing...which shouldn't be difficult at all seeing as I've implemented at least one of all those things at one time or another in a piece of code within the game. This update seems kind of boring, not a lot of technical details and most of it was filled with a poor excuse of a photoshop tutorial, but writing this helps me clear my mind and defrag it, so I hope the read was enjoyable anyway. The next article should be much more in depth with some video footage because I'm on the verge of getting all power ups and weapons into the game, as well as some better looking models and artwork...I hope! Thanks for reading.