The Great Rebranding

Monsters Loot Swag - rebranded

 The Great Rebranding of Monsters Loot Swag is upon us.

I decided with full release from Early Access due soon™ that the main brand artwork would benefit from being in the same style as all the other character portrait art, and so set about coming up with a new paintings. This is also the style which the intro and outro sequences will take - and that itself is currently the immediate ongoing work, and really the last thing to do before full release.

Early Access has alas not worked out as I had originally hoped for, being immediately lost into a sea of being ignored, but then I expect that this is just how it goes for the average no-name indie devs launching early access games.

One thing modeling related which I have been doing amongst the veritable onslaught of drawing, has been to retopographize some of my earlier catgirl models. Previously I had used a Blender3D plugin to automate highpoly models down to lower tris counts. Whilst that had saved quite a lot of time, the tris count was still rather high considering the game is a top-down shooter with the characters being fairly small on screen, and the resulting UV maps were horrible strips, not the sort of thing that could ever be considered modder friendly.

Left: Automated; Right: Manual Retopology

 I had used the custom generic player character which I had manually retopologized from April 2024, and this itself reduced polycount by around 60% of what the automated plugin did, all whilst preserving human readable UV maps. I find that due to the small size of the player model on screen, that baking ambient occlusion into the albedo/colour map improves how it looks, even though ambient occlusion still takes place inside the PBR ORM map (occlusion, roughness, metal).

The generic retopologized human character model

So, once again it was a case of do not send a machine to do a man's job ... and all of the presumed labour-saving of yesteryear had been for naught. So now, I am the proud owner of 8 lowerpoly catgirls who all weigh in around 4-6K triangles.

In frog related news I have been forced to put netting over the frog pond as my local murder of corvids have been committing murder in the frogpond. 🐸 

I have been feeding the crows for a while and they've always been very friendly so this sudden turn of events was completely uncalled for. They're big fans of that awful US style burger cheese (wouldn't touch the stuff myself) and also rather fond of monkey nuts, when they're not getting gristly bits of steak or other cutoffs. Also I've seen them beat up Herring Gulls which is what I really want them hanging around for.

So that was the month of March space year 2025, and my efforts to finish off the fluff piece of explaining an actual plot for Monsters Loot Swag continues, taking up much drawing and GUI planning, with all still on course to ship in April.

 

Terrors Of Retopography

4K tris versus 8K tris

 Amongst a slew of bug fixes I have been designing a new unlockable playable character. This has once again led to problems of topology - or more accurately retopology from a not very high poly character to a much lower poly character.

You would think that there would be some automated plugin that could do all of this for you, that it could take a mesh with a lot of triangles and reduce it whilst keeping some semblance of the vertex point weightings. And there is, and it can ... except you have to kiss goodbye to your nicely laid out UV map. Now you try modding this ...

Behold the computer generated horrors beyond your comprehension

It does a really good job of decimation and a really terrible job of UVs, textures and materials in general.

The problem appears to be that my starting mesh is some +20K tris, which is great for an up-close viewing of the character - especially in the viewports of Blender - but not so great when you want it reduced auto-magickally. Especially as I hate manual retopology due to it being the utter epitome of donkey work.

If only you could just remove edge loops in a sensible way - but wait! You can! Blender has it's own decimate modifier, and surely loops can be reduced just as the can be increased? Yes but no.

Just auto-reduce loops bro! Yeah but nah, but really wtf is this?

However this is something that could be cleaned up, and in the end I did, thus using that as a new basic mesh to work from, and it's a much more reasonable 6K tris. And after customizing that to a new character, it can be manually reduced by merging loops to keep the bone weights and UV maps intact.

Try and spot the difference from the actual game camera height

 Once again the real problem seems to be the tunnel vision of working up close in the modeling editor, and I am sure that that 4K mesh could get some more reductions without anyone ever noticing. However it appears to be not just me that goes overkill on character meshes ...

Squint percentage per eye ...

Dragon's Dogma 2 character creator allows for squints by percent per eye ... but in-game, your character is barely a third of the screen in height. Not sure that is going to be all that visible when your character's head is only 64 pixels.

My new playable catgirl cosplayer is called Polaris, and does that 北斗百裂拳, Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken thing minus the waaa-ATATATATATA battle cry, so you'll have to shout it yourself. The character portrait isn't completed yet and I'm still balancing the stats and attack attributes, so update to Steam should be next week.

It's British Summer Time, at least horology wise, I am removing the winter duvet, so naturally the weather has taken a turn for the worst. Maybe with April here Spring might finally start, as it seems to have done nothing but rain and be generally miserable since October.

 

I also had a thought about the methodology of making a roaming brawler, one where the player could upgrade to the move sets and customize their own controls based on fighting styles and how to code this as combat events. This brought me back to thinking about the melee combat system I coded an example of previously which uses hitboxes, and whether that would be good gameplay system; a (probably side) scrolling roaming hack and slash where you level up your character not just with attributes but also armour and weaponery, restarting each "run at the game" with all the new stuff you earned in previous runs. This way the player would start off very weak and get killed quickly, then spend whatever XP you acquired on better stats or kit and go again, eventually leading to the player becoming massively OP in early levels. It would work a bit like reverse permadeath, with the player's XP being permanant and allowing the unlocking and equipping of better weapons and protections but also melee based move sets that could be customized to control binds.

As Monsters Loot Swag near completion, 1 more level with enemy boss, and 2 more playable characters to add, I am beginning to think more of what the next game will be, and after having created the proof of concept for MLS NINE FUGGING YEARS AGO I think I need to work on a shorter development cycle for my next project.

Novemeber Cometh November Goeth

 

November has come and gone in what felt like record timing. The Steam Autumn/Fall sale is underway and I threw in Airship Dragoon for the Steam Awards category "Labor of Love", due to updating it after nine years on Valve's platform. More on that available on Steam.

November was a blur of getting the dreaded lurgy - which seemed to take forever and half a million hot toddies to clear, and testing, testing, testing ...

Testing many, many things ... 

Such as trying to lower the polycount on Monsters Loot Swag models. Previously I had used an automated plugin to reduce polycount for Level Of Detail, however this made a horrible mess of UV mapping. So I decided to try Blender's own decimation tools such as "UnSubDivide" - which would surely reduce edgeloops by simply unsubdividing the mesh ... yeah, well, actually it didn't ...

Unsubdivide edgeloops ... unsubdivides right?

Almost like it does one half of the body fine, then gets bored and just compresses the edgeloops and swaps to the other half of the body.

I am not a fan of retopology because I do not understand why it cannot be automated perfectly - especially on a model with perfectly equal edgeloops. This is the exact sort of soul destroying donkey work which should be easily automated and technically is automated if you want it to be a shyte ...

I did try a number of other programs - which I believe cool kids call "apps" these days on the grounds any word over four letters is too difficult or energy consuming to utter. One of these was MeshLab which seemed to do a fairly decent job at reducing 25K to 7K, though I still felt should have saved the UV map better. Or I could just manually retopo, but as I have avoided doing that for years I don't really want to start now ... especially as getting mesh deformation to not be shyte seems to be even more of a pain in the arse ... see below.

In addition to polycounts there has also been a whole host of messing around with the newer aspects of the engine which has been the focus of the Monsters Loot Swag BETA test build. This has been a lot of testing, fixing, streamlining and bug reporting, all of which are slowly but surely going into improving the engine and game build, though at the moment there is nothing too concrete to show as a game update.

But back to low poly.

Low poly Lara with some good low poly deformation techniques

I started making a low poly character, in a somewhat stylized plane based style. Nigh on 30 years ago I actually sculpted this type of head in concrete with a metal frame made of metal coat hangers... which proved to be a mistake when attempting to move it anywhere as I had not made it hollow, and so it weighed a ton.

Low poly mesh deformation is somewhat more of a pain in the butt than normal. Got a bad deform when bend bones? No problems, slap more edgeloops in and jiggle them about a bit. Except this cannot be done when you are modeling a plane based low poly humanoid.

Back of the elbow needs to come out somewhat

The simpler meshes get, the more horrendous deformation becomes, and the more difficult retaining versus collapsing polys are.

This is all being done for two purposes, one is for a potential low poly with hard edges/planes style future project, and the second is for more practise in reducing topology whilst keeping good movement deformation for current work.

In other news, it's cold and damp. The Pentalon Javelins - that's a type of winter spud that is harvestable at Christmas, and not a 1950s RAF experimental supersonic jet fighter; though it really sounds like it should have been -  appear to have died a death, going the way of this year's strawberry crop under the chronic wetness. I've been eyeing up designs of a padded gambeson to try and survive winter and also padded armour may help survive the GREAT HAPPENING when the lights go out and society crumbles.

December approaches ... and don't even get me started on Space Year 2024.