Screen Shot Saturday & Devlog - November 7, 2020

Short update this week. As many of you can likely understand, we were a bit distracted this week by the drawn-out US Election. The whole circus took a lot of our attention away from GameDev this week.

We do have progress to report, despite the distractions!

NCO Quarters

We boxed out the NCO Quarters.

These are actual quarters now, with a bed and desk and walls. You no longer walk out into space if you go through one of these doors, which is probably a good thing. On top of that, we actually know many of the characters who will live here. We’ve fleshed out some more of the revised early story. While a few of these rooms are still just background environment, several have story relevance now and are home to specific characters.

Quartermaster Office / Heavy Storage

We ended up with a huge space we didn’t know what to do with. A large area in the starting portion of the map was originally going to contain the infirmary and a fitness center or training area. For story and gameplay reasons (no spoilers!), we had to move the infirmary to a completely different part of the map, leaving this big hole of prime real estate right near the start. The only story area we didn’t have a place for was the Quartermaster’s office (“quartermaster” in the land army use of the title, not the naval use; this is a Marine ship, not a Navy ship).

A single office wasn’t enough to fill the empty space, though. We could have left it empty - there’s no reason not to have parts of the ship inaccessible to the player. Presumably, a lot of space would be taking up by infrastructure, but it seemed a shame not to use that space for something interesting. Then we realized that it would actually make sense to combine the Quartermaster office with a warehouse-type space, since the quartermaster on a Marine ship would likely be responsible for keeping tracking of goods and equipment.

Of course, we realized after we built the first version of the warehouse, that there was no way they could get these large crates and pieces of equipment in and out of the room through the one small door we had given it. So, we added a giant cargo lift, which works out well story-wise, because we want to provide multiple paths for the player to get to one of the ship’s hangar bays later in the game. It’s logical that one of the places this heavy lift would go would be the hangar bays, so the lift can now be one of the alternate paths to the hangar.

Although we built a warehouse to store all the various larger items a ship would need and labeled it “Heavy Storage”, only a small part of the space has any real story use so far. We decided to make a little treasure hunt and three-dimensional maze in the warehouse to encourage and reward the player for exploring. We’ll probably also add a side-quest or two in this space to give players a concrete reason to come here and explore.

Most of the warehouse is reachable by the player—albeit not always easily reachable—and there are some rewards scattered around the space for players to find.

We did some more minor tweaks to other parts of the map, and also did another lighting pass, but even with just these two areas of map expansion this week, the map is starting to feel quite a bit larger. In fact, it’s gotten large enough that we sometimes get lost when playing.

Character Work Continues

We also made some more progress on the character models. The male-presenting model has now been re-sculpted and re-rigged. It has a number of morph targets for different body shapes and facial features and even has a couple of clothing and hair options, though the clothing is not lore-appropriate yet. We’re getting close to being able to have this model replace the remaining UE4 mannequins throughout the maps.

Our female-presenting model already has some clothing and hair options, but doesn’t have any morphs to adjust body shape or facial features, and still needs lore-appropriate outfits. Unlike the male model, the asset we’re using for female-presenting characters didn’t come with source files, so we’ve begun the somewhat tedious process of converting the exported model and converting it from tris to quads so we can sculpt morph targets and generate new normal maps without subdiv artifacts.

Our work on this front was sped up a bit this week by the release of a new Blender addon called Quick Rig, which is an addon for another Blender addon called Auto-Rig Pro that we already use in our Blender to UE4 pipeline. Our old approach, however, required re-rigging the model after we imported it from UE$ for all but the most minor changes. With Quick Rig, we can convert an existing model to the Auto-Rig Pro control rig without having to completely re-rig them. That should be a huge time savings moving forward. Hopefully, in a few weeks, we’ll have more variety in our female-presenting model and maybe a start on some new clothes.

That’s about all we have this week. Hopefully, the presidential race will finally get called and we can all go back to focusing on GameDev instead of politics.