How I build the world of Mail Tail | Devlog

Wishlist Mail Tail on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/20...
Special thanks to Red Eyes Studios for producing the music for the game and this video.

[@26xBenny]

Yes please I'd love to hear more about the asset creation process! Already your level creation blender tips were very useful to me

[@peacefusion]

That blender import work was insane.

[@notroublegames]

Amazed. Amused. Delighted. And your art style is admirable. 🤩 And I'm already looking forward to the next episode.

[@dreamcatforgotten8435]

I recommend making a Discord community so you have a place to post and share your progress, even if it is incremental. You are a good artist, and you integrate both your 2D and 3D art skills very well into this game! And the mechanics you have worked on for the character seem quite fun :3 I hope your project does well in terms of iterations and eventually sales :3

[@YahyaDanboos]

wow, that's amazing how you're creating the whole world in blender and then exporting it to Unreal Engine, even more amazing is how you wrote a custom script to transfer the scene from Blender to Unreal. You're a jack of all trades, amazing work!!! 👏👏👏

[@emmanuelwhyte9044]

Awesome display and demonstration of your work flow. NoTrouble Games said it best, really delightful and looking forward to more!

[@shanepaige9135]

Wish listed! Making the props in blender blows my mind, thanks for sharing

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, thanks for the wishlist :D

[@gegi4577]

i appreciate every mention of Gothic on KZbin. best RPG ever

[@steventreibly]

Definitely would love to hear more about the asset creation. Your level design workflow in blender was very insightful, and your art is incredible

[@2-joabella655]

You are an amazing artist, cant wait for the next devlog

[@ianbee1959]

Wow this looks amazing. I’ve been watching tons of game dev log videos on KZbin the past couple days and haven’t felt compelled enough to leave a comment on any of them. Tons of people out there making objectively great games, some with appealing art styles and worlds.. but this game you’re making really connects with me from an art style / environment just overall awesome level. Amazing work! Great job. :) really really awesome

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, that's super nice to hear! Thanks for the kind words :D

[@hai0.0]

woah!! this is super cool man! wishing you the best of luck on your work

[@peakakupo]

I am glad I was recommended this dev log and found you. As a game dev myself I love watching the workflows of others. With so many dev logs using pre made assets it’s nice to see devs making their own, and having their game stand out. Amazing job , looking forward as a new sub to your next video update and definitely mail tail is on my wishlist .

[@drinkwwwaterrr]

This looks awesome! I love how you went into detail for your workflow

[@jiratrello]

really nice workflow

[@Plabs_]

This games art is gorgeous! Definitely keeping an eye on it!

[@rucadog]

This is wonderful! I am so charmed by the game alone and your detail into your workflow is incredibly helpful!! I've been struggling to get used to setting up assets in unreal, so watching you go through a lot of it in blender has really inspired me. I super love your style and would love to hear more about your asset creation process! Keep up the good work!!!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey there, nice to hear you liked it! Thanks for the kind words :D

[@CaiusNelson]

The game is looking really nice! You've got a good sense of humor as well. Makes your videos really enjoyable to watch.

[@lawrence9713]

absolutely perfect. devlog with tutorial combined. even tho im working with unity, I learned a TON from this. 100% sub

[@robinleheist4764]

Glad to hear this :D

[@mutantshrimp168]

Really good work there

[@angel_luis]

Here a spanish suscriber from Reddit!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, thanks for the sub :D

[@panpanplusplus]

your game looks really charming!

[@torq21]

Really great video! Your game is looking beautiful.

[@lucasfarias1148]

Really beautiful looking game! Your workflow it's really cool too! Also, I really love the interactions of the player with the environment :D

[@KaioGX1]

Mail Tail looks amazing @RobinLeHeist and your videos are really fun to watch. Congratulations! I would love to hear about how you managed to make these wonderful "smoke fogs"

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey there, thank you for the kind words ^^ I can definitely do a breakdown in one of the next videos. I use the same technique that Tomas Sala used for the Falconeer. He talks about it briefly in this interview with Thomas Brush: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hGbRdKNua9-rldE

[@Rickynovantotto]

oh my god this game looks SO NICE, I have to work right now but I can't wait too see the rest of the video, instantly subscribed

[@DarkTech_Official]

Dude, your style is so awsome.🤯

[@Eu.Claire]

i really love this, also really really curious about the blender and unreal seamless workflow. 😍😍😍😍

[@jorrdan.]

Congrats on 1k subscribers!

[@aSnugglyDuckling]

I love how the game world looks. Please keep releasing videos 😊

[@Husmanmusic]

This was such a fun watch and the game looks really fun!

[@mexarrinha]

Definitely like the vibe of the terrain! Good work!

[@stormgamesyt]

New subscriber! The game is so well-made, and it also serves as great inspiration for me who is currently learning Unreal Engine. You just taught me so many new things I could dive into, thank you!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, that's great to hear ;)

[@hardgamer9342]

Your game looks very interesting. I like to play the game.

[@andywaterhouse3466]

This looks great! Love the art style.

[@Unfug90]

Please show us more of your process, especially the handcrafted asset part interests me. Beautiful work so far, I loved the jellyfish.

[@Maxwell_Kenway]

Damn this looks good. For a single person project you are pretty far already having gameplay, level, animations, sequences with text and all. Hope you will have a great time with your project and get a a lot of people to find it. Have a great one and keep on keeping on 👍

[@kwipxd]

THIS LOOKS BEAUTIFUL! wishlisting right now

[@Ch0rr1s]

Dude. i just discovered your Channel thanks to the might and magic Xoutube algorithm. HOLY COW!!! Did you do all the assets yourself like shown? Damn! thats quite some design skill there. Blender, Photoshop, Unreal.... It looks amazing. i wishlisted the game. It looks fantastic and the short "gameplay" moments i've seen looked really nice. Looks like a relaxing zelda-ish feeling. Love it. Great work!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey thanks for the kind words :D and thanks for the wishlist!

[@grunnindieps1-stylesurviva200]

Learned a lot from this. Thank you! PS. your game looks awesome!

[@osakitsukiko]

IT LOOKS AMAZING! Great Job!

[@Dondingo4]

Wishlisted!

[@MikeCore]

I'd love more on your modeling process

[@AvexFuddle]

It looks amazing, lovely style 😊

[@Arrynore]

"Handpaint the textures"... I will never be able to texture anything. Your level of talent is on a different scale my man

[@Inaaka]

I love this artstyle

[@nathandane452]

I love the asset creation part! I enjoy pretty much any part though, so if the amount of videos will be limited its best to have a different focus in each vid to get everything in there. I also noticed the colour palette feels a little cold and muted. Thats pretty subjective though so it may be best to get a couple opinions but always nice to fiddle with the colour balances on the post processing stack! Great video!

[@VEOdev]

It looks so awesome and relaxing, one thing I would like to see in the game is indication where your character is gonna fall, specially that it have some platforming aspects to it, sometimes it hard to see if your character will fall to the platform

[@sufifrank]

this is such a good video!

[@takaw.d8486]

im trying to start making my own Game, this inspireq me!!, ill be sure to wish list your game to support ya!!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, that's super awesome to hear :D

[@KeithSwanger]

Looking great!

[@3d_pablo]

looking forward to your journey

[@overtoon]

Yeaah Robin, Mega nice!!!!

[@hellowngarfgar778]

Wow man this looks amazing cool

[@bluvalor7443]

Oh wow, it looks so good :o

[@Tbjbu2]

Wow this devlog was awesome, really entertaining, and your artwork is beautiful, and it was really interesting to see your workflow from Blender to Unreal. One thing I'll note is at 6:40 you were ending the video but then went on for another minute - this is not good for the YT algorithm - when you say that you're ending the video, you should end it very fast to keep the retention high. Also I love how you already have a Steam page up to collect wishlists, so many KZbinrs do this way too late... Waiting for the next videos!!

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, thanks a ton! That sounds like a really good tip, I'll end my next video differently then :)

[@kettenotter]

Damn that cool and like your artstsyle! Nice workaround for exporting the mesh Instances from Blender. I had the same problem because I wanted to place the instances inside of Gravity Sketch (an VR modelling software which can run standalone). I used Houdini, and encoded the unreal path into the fbx mesh name, but then it got to long and now I hash the path and store that in the mesh name. I also store a second hash with all the materials. Then I can export different material variations. I also bake an Imposter for the meshes with a texture in UE and transfer it back to the individual meshes inside Houdini, so that I can see the materials in gravity sketch. But know it works great and I could export entire scenes! But was such a pain because I tried a bunch of different formats and all had different problems.

[@XraeL]

I would love to learn about the asset part, This is one thing i dont see devs talking about and its something I need so bad as a new gamedev.

[@C-Core]

Wow this looks so good! Really love the artstyle and your asset look very well made. It looks like you have some grass hanging off the sides on your cliffs? Is that part of your modular cliff meshes or do you have a process to e.g. place a stripmesh in blender onto the terrain as well? Also, I would love to see a video on asset creation :)

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey thanks, the grass is part of the cliff mesh. No magic there :)

[@nicodela6854]

Very interesting again ! The workflow you showed to update the things between blender and UE is very clever. I'm guessing you made it just for you personal use, but I realized it's exactly the workflow I'm looking for. Are you planning to share it ? It's typically the kind of things that would be a good reason to subscribe to a patreon :)

[@robinleheist4764]

I actually didn't plan on sharing it so far. But the idea with Patreon does sound interesting :)

[@lenargilmanov7893]

Impressive!

[@dimoronen]

Subscribed. I would really like to hear more about your high level thoughts when working on this. I'm playing around with similar things now for a test-level, using outside methods (Houdini, World creator, Maya) for my terrains as well rather than Unreal directly but haven't gotten at all this far yet. Btw how do you deal with the materials and UVs for terrain meshes etc? I suppose the upside to regular terrain is simply how much faster you could potentially output more content. For your game though it seems enough by far and allows you to have a higher quality feel.

[@robinleheist4764]

Thanks for the sub ^^ The texture mapping is quite simple. You just take the xy-world-coordinates of your mesh for the top projection, your xz-coords for the front projection and yz coords for the right projection. Then you divide the coordinates to get the right scaling and you use the normal vector of the mesh to interpolate between your three projections, so you don't get some weird texture stretching.

[@G30RG3_]

Hey, this game looks amazing! These videos are also really cool, I like following the progress. Where can I find more information?

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey there, thanks for the nice comment :D I don't really have a lot of infos about it right now. It's just this channel and maybe also my twitter page: twitter.com/RobinLeHeist I want to get back to making new videos soon.

[@adammain3424]

Beautiful work. Just the inspiration I needed right now. If I can ask, since you are using a triplanar shader for the terrain, how did you go about painting paths? Are they additional meshes?

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey, thanks :D I use vertex colors to drive the opacity of the paths. The uv for the paths is generated using the xy-world-coordinate (z pointing up) of the terrain mesh divided by a size parameter. I then use the uv to sample a diffuse- and a height-map. The heightmap value is then used in combination with the red vertex color channel to blend the path texture with the terrain. The formula for the height blending is: PathAlpha = Pow(Clamp(VertexColor.X * 2.0f + HeightMapValue - 1.0f , Min:0.0f, Max:1.0f) , FalloffExponent); The FalloffExponent can be used to control how hard the transition between road and terrain is.

[@kanoeyes]

Subscribed

[@IDENTICYEA]

Wow!

[@MoD-zf9lv]

Wow this project is really cool! Just a question about the exports, is the pivot of all your objects in unreal at the center of the world? Or maybe your addon copies the position of your objects, moves them to the center of the world, export, and then in unreal paste the position? I'm asking because I don't find a quick and clean way to transpose a blender scene to unreal (in terms of positions and pivots). Thank you, good luck on your project, I'll definitely follow it :)

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey thanks :) the plugin does not export the objects themselves. It just exports the object transforms + the reference to the corresponding unreal asset. I added a new string property to my objects in Blender that holds the unreal reference. When I set up a new object I need to copy the reference over to Blender once to establish the connection. This way I get a regular unreal scene with normal-looking pivots and I can also use lods and setup distance culling etc.

[@crabbite3093]

Soo cool

[@gamestacheindiegamedevelop5796]

That was awesome, reckon you could do a quick tutorial on that tri-planar shader or whatever its called :D Or any tips/references

[@robinleheist4764]

That's nice to hear :D you can probably just search for it on google and find plenty of resources. I learned it by reading a Unity tutorial a while ago and that translated pretty well into Unreal. And yeah, I think it would make for a nice tutorial but it will probably not be the next video.

[@Piperscpp]

@@robinleheist4764 which tutorial

[@robinleheist4764]

​@@Piperscpp I used this: catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/advanced-rendering/triplanar-mapping/ It's for unity though and you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the mapping part.

[@Piperscpp]

@@robinleheist4764 Thank you :)

[@robinleheist4764]

​@@Piperscpp Hey there, yes that's pretty much how I do it :) Glad the link helped. I wasn't aware that Unreal already has a node for that 0.0 Thanks for the tip! I guess you could use the box mapping on texture nodes to get something similar in Blender. I'll have a look at the WorldAlignedTexture node and see what it can do soon. But I'll most likely stick to my custom approach for now.

[@MattHassing]

More asset creation!!!!

[@Piperscpp]

Please do a triplanar shader tutorial with just some base material like green, gray, sand or something:)

[@nathantron]

Use the terrain boolean plugin; (can't remember the name) but yeah, you just have to model the caves/overhangs, and they are subtracted from the terrain and it creates overhangs and caves by carving it out.

[@TheFlyingEpergne]

i would actually really love a vid on how you do the handpainted textures in photoshop, it's something i'd love to do myself but dont know the best logistical way to do it do you unwrap first or paint first?

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey there, I do the unwrapping first. You can export your uv layout as a png and open it in Photoshop, so you know where to paint.

[@DrumsVSTheWorld]

are you using just 1 cliff mesh that you are slapping on the base island a bunch of times? the whole environment looks really good!

[@robinleheist4764]

Yeah, it's just one cliff mesh for this island. I had another cliff that could be turned upside down to get more variation. But I'll need to rework it since they don't really fit together as well. I'll probably end up with about 3 cliffs for the overworld and that will most likely be enough.

[@Alaabale]

wow

[@lunariancore]

Please do an asset tutorial

[@powerewopetc5171]

hi, it looks beauty what did you use to add grass, shells, etc?

[@robinleheist4764]

Hey thanks :) I use the default vegetation painting tools in Unreal Engine. It's not optimal to do it this way, since you have to redo vegetation painting when you make changes to the terrain. I think it would be a good idea to implement some kind of automation to this at some point (probably using instanced static meshes). But painting vegetation takes relatively little time, so it doesn't hurt too much to redo things. Still, could be better :/

[@powerewopetc5171]

​@@robinleheist4764 i see, thank you for quick reply i stucked on grass painting in Unity, to many triangles, to many batches, but nobody talk about optimization :D good luck with your game, man

[@sarahm2005]

This looks so good 😊... But it's a mail delivery game? That's.... Unusual. I was expecting a whole story arch!

[@robinleheist4764]

Thanks, :D and yeah, it's still a pretty small game. It's honestly all I can do as a solo part time dev.

[@01untitleduntitled]

hope you ate that pizza!

[@deadend6399]

Nice video but the music was to loud could barely hear you good luck with the game

[@naramoro]

How would asset creation be boring? Definitely interested

[@Paul_Ward]

Wait, wait, wait... you've done all of this by yourself? 😮

[@robinleheist4764]

Indeed.

[@Paul_Ward]

@@robinleheist4764 that's very impressive. I've added this one to my wishlist, the professional level of art and direction I've seen so far is mind blowing

[@flotto7045]

Who wouldn't wanna a workflow for habdpainting stuff though?

[@skribler6916]

Can models in blender be high poly or keep them low

[@robinleheist4764]

I like to keep the individual assets fairly low poly. Blender isn't as performant when it comes to drawing entire scenes so it can help to keep the models simple.

[@skribler6916]

@RobinLeHeist your game looks great BTW 👍

[@skribler6916]

@RobinLeHeist ok I am rebuilding my characters low polyish and will uv texture the high poly onto it. How big can you make this world BTW could you double it?

[@amasiuncula2142]

You gotta try gaea

[@DailyPaily]

Starting with Blender, and now need zbrush and substance....buff

[@SadTown99]

I’m confused, Unreal Engine doesn’t let you import Blender files/assets? So he made his own plug-in to do so? 🤔

[@robinleheist4764]

Hello, I'm here for clarification :D The plugin does not export the objects themselves. It exports the object transforms. This way I can export the whole scene while still being able to tweak setting on the individual assets in Unreal.

[@RockyMulletGamedev]

Enough with the pineapple on pizza debate, the real question: Do you like trees and rocks on your pizza ?

[@robinleheist4764]

Hehe, well put sir! Pineapple fan here btw.

[@Gurem]

Why am I hearing mhfu style music. It's tripping my brain out.

[@robinleheist4764]

It's not from monster hunter.

[@Gurem]

@@robinleheist4764 I love it. Where can i get a 10 hour loop of it.

[@robinleheist4764]

@@Gurem Use this: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aJ-bn3t9nbZsapY it's not listed but you can add it to a playlist ;D

[@ZennExile]

I am not mad at anything I am seeing. I'll list this as a wish. But there is something I do not see and hope that you have not forsaken. Stories. The ones with no words about the world and how it might experience the player as the player experiences it. "Hogwash, double talk, ambiguous dribble", you may say these things. But I say no. A world with no stories to tell is a dead unwelcoming world. That beach could tell me a story about a crab that loves a star fish and visits his beloved by the moonlight to serenade her with that gurgling bubble blowing sound that they make... if only there were little crab trails in the sand. Maybe that bush has a bird nest, and that grass has a worm or two. Maybe a Robin named Christopher Robin does the accent your are hearing in your head right now. As he's Walken over to pull a worm for his beautiful baby chicks, back at the nest. You don't know. Because there's no stories. You just can't know. Or maybe a Skink named Sheela, she sits on the rock to keep warm in the sun, and her bff a Salamander named Britney sits down there in the shade where it's cool, and they gossip, about how Christopher don't know Sharon tweets at other birds while he's out pullin on worms to feed the kids. But they ain't one to gossip so you ain't heard that from them. mmmmhmmm Bake me a Pie, tell me stories while I eat it. I'm over cake. Even for birthdays.

[@kreenbopulusmichael7205]

just use houdini

[@saibadam]

Jinx looked like a dude

[@DemoniumSama]

Why are the cool kids furries? That's self-contradictory

[@robinleheist4764]

I guess that would depend on your personal preferences😅