How I made my game look much better (Indie game devlog #9)

[@KyleRhoadsDev]

That object clustering really brings a lot of life to the environment, and those models look really good for just being early development art.

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks man, glad you liked it :D

[@gamedevaki]

4:30 is very insightful - the part about 3 layered terrain painting. That sounds like a tip that I want to try for myself too!

[@doltramir]

I love it. I just love. On a different note, you should rotate skybox around planet's center, and not around character/camera.

[@witek_smitek]

I've just stepped on your channel at reddit... nice devlogs. I am always happy to see when somebody writes some own code and not trying to make a XXXXth game made with Unity. Great work, keep it that way! :)

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thank you! And welcome :D

[@benfoote9945]

It took me ages to figure out how important object clustering is for low-poly. It's great that you've worked it into your algorithm!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Definitely. I would even say it's important for non-low poly stuff too.

[@Frank_G_Finster]

Honestly, if this is your very first modeled, rigged and animated character, you definitely have talent that you can build on. Looking forward to see where this project gets.

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks! And yeah, I pretty much kept spending time on it until it looked acceptable. A real/experienced 3d artist wouldve modeled/rigged/skinned like 10 characters in the time it took me to do this haha (and they would probably look better as well) Oh well, I do enjoy the learning process though, its a nice break from programming

[@aseedboi9408]

Woah! your engine looks nice. And those little details like the branches and stones on the ground, really make it feel alive. Great work!

[@perlinfall]

Man, I'm really impressed with how this project is coming along! Already looks very nice in it's early development stages. I'm curious, how did you learn the skillsets required to program and 3d model the things shown in the video, and how long have you been doing it? I'm a beginner to game development and would love to know what you did to learn these skills.

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks man! I've been programming for quite a long time, I started learning C++ just by following internet tutorials and stuff when I was about 14 (though I didn't really get good at it until I was like 20 ish.) I later got a degree in applied comp sci, but most of my knowledge still comes from learning stuff on my own tbh. For 3D modeling I don't have anywhere near that kind of experience. I once took a class (one semester) in basic lowpoly modeling with 3ds Max , which covered basic modeling, unwrapping and texturing. That's pretty much it. I'm actually just now learning how to rig and animate as I go hehe. Another skill that is very useful for gamedev is knowing how to use Photoshop btw. I feel that one gets overlooked a lot but it's huge as well. I use it for almost everything, UI art, textures, logos (combined with illustrator) etc..

[@G7ue]

Ohh, its starting to look a lot like Valheim's generation, except with 3D voxel possibilities! Getting the little details of things like rocks generating in clusters, and trees generating plants and roots around them can make a massive difference in the feel and enjoyment of exploring a world. The potential of this project is now really being shown off, and I cant wait to see where it goes!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks a lot dude!

[@jcd9456]

Some of your explaination (if not most) went over my head like how you colored the top of the mini hills lighter and stuff. I really love the visuals that you achieved, please keep going I would love to continue seeing more!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thank you! Are there any specific parts you feel that could have been explained better? It’s always hard to balance for me between explaining things and not dragging stuff out too much but I’m very curious for feedback on this

[@jcd9456]

​ @Giant Sloth Games Your video is well organized! For me your explaination is sufficient, I just said that "it went over my head" is my bad way of saying "I need to do my own studies in order to apply it in my own project/s" hehe..

[@GiantSlothGames]

@@jcd9456 Ah okay, good luck! :D

[@twomur_]

Dude when you added the skybox and fog it just made the game look 100 times better! really great progress love to see it keep it up!!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks a lot dude :D

[@Mdogg2005]

Algorithm hit me with this video and I love your art style and way you explained things in this. Got yourself a sub from me. Keep up the awesome work!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks you!

[@crispy_dev]

Awesome devlog and amazing progress, as always!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks a lot!

[@7Wolfbrother7]

Game is starting to look nice, the art style is really coming into its own. Very curious to see some other biome concepts!

[@publicalias8172]

I'm really happy to have found your channel, the new art style and generation is great thanks for sharing your progress with the rest of us!

[@DjCtavia]

Starting with your devlog 9, the subjects and how you've worked on it for the video is super interesting! I'll probably just hang around your channel and see how you evolve, love your format, and maybe I'll learn 1 or 2 things on the way :)

[@aluckyshot]

Looks awesome, Blender rocks. It really is overwhelming making your first character. Good for you, your animations don't look that bad. Just remember there are literally folks that spend their entire day animating on rigs and models they didn't even make 🤯 whole different world when it is just you.

[@GiantSlothGames]

Yeah, the struggles of being solo I guess. Eventually I would like to have a proper artist re-do some of the essential models if I can ever get the funding for it :D Until then my art will have to suffice

[@Phan7055]

excited to play this lmao, these devlogs are really enjoyable.

[@JayCode_dev]

The difference is quite noticeable. Really good job!

[@jaminjamon4309]

damn bro u dont know how much i like this object clustering. Great Work keep it up!

[@bausider]

I imagine that, with you mentioning how you want players to start in a forest/somewhere familiar, it means that the plan is to have harder or less earth-like areas be generated further away from the initial spawning area. For that, implementing some sort of compass to see the direction the player is going towards might be a way to help and incentivice players into searching further into those areas and not accidentally turning back into somewhere they've already been at. Of course, this is pure speculation and maybe you already thought of adding that in a future point, in some way or another. Either way, all the progress you've made looks so appealing and in my opinion starts to show just how great it will be in the end Have a nice week, you and your work are both amazing!

[@GiantSlothGames]

First of all, thanks so much! I really appreciate it! And yes, you were pretty much spot on. The area around the spawning point will always be a Heartlands biome (which this forest is a part of), and the more dangerous biomes will be further from the spawn. (With some twists I don't wanna spoil yet.) As for the compass idea, I'm currently thinking of doing a minimap and/or even a fully fledged map instead. Those would only show already explored parts though, the rest would be blacked out a la terraria. Ofcourse I'm open to feedback on all of this.

[@KamranWali]

Awesome video! The game looks really impressive. Really like the art style of your game and the sky looks beautiful. Keep it up! :)

[@CrashingBirds]

Damn, the difference is day and night! :D Looks amazing!

[@darkigg]

Would might be quiet a challenge for you, but you should add some stractures around to be procedurally placed, and maybe also some caves. New biomes as well and an ocean won't be a bad idea as well. I pretty sure these are all planned to be added but I want to make sure

[@cris7al]

Love your art direction even right now I can see myself play it !

[@M1n1smog]

10/10 would watch again, cant wait to see more

[@PCgameandgamer]

Looking absolutely great my dude 👍

[@aephemerial-tv]

It looks really really good! P.S. Keep it up with the blender game! 👌🏻

[@TransitionPhase]

Been following the process, it's amazing what you are doing PJ 😁 Keep it up. Grts

[@GiantSlothGames]

Ayy, thanks a lot :D

[@ObviousDev]

Yooo, this looks cool :) Great work! Keep it up

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thank you! :D

[@NickelW]

giving me Valheim vibes, which is great! I dig the art style, I'll be watching this game from now on :)

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thank you!

[@ourabig]

adding belgique fries as food to make will be cool

[@imTroNic]

Wow, you are getting pretty nice game!

[@Lucas-gg9yb]

Nice! I think you should shade the terrain smooth to make the game look better

[@skourge891]

Wow this looks awesome! Subbed

[@soheil6180]

Good job. The game is looking nice. Keep up the good work.

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thank you!

[@Umbra2310]

1:36 good dead space characters there

[@yaaannn8126]

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ur character model is not even bad good job

[@GiantSlothGames]

Ayy, thanks yann! This kind of stuff is really the hardest part for me :P

[@mekkmann]

Dude, this is great!!!

[@lafinca437]

Very good tips!

[@leo_mars]

Looks awesome

[@IanDiaz]

Just found this channel, definitely looks like a very neat project. Out of curiosity, why are you writing custom exporters for Max/Blender rather than exporting to a standard format like FBX/GLTF and using something like assimp/the FBX SDK/tinygltf to convert it to your in-engine format?

[@GiantSlothGames]

Yeah, this is what I should have done in the first place. Back when I first wrote it I never thought I’d use anything other than Max and thought an exporter would make my life easier because it would save me the extra step of having to convert the files. It turned out to be a mistake. I did start writing an assimp importer for my editor during the period of this devlog actually but it wasn’t finished. When I get back to this in the future this is definitely the route I’ll take though, I’ve learned my lesson haha.

[@johnleorid]

What is the premise of the game? Will it be an RPG, Roguelike, Non-Combat Farming, .. What''s the next thing you will work on? NPCs?

[@GiantSlothGames]

The goal is to have an action-adventure sandbox game (with elements from RPG & survival games.) It will be much like Terraria/CubeWorld Alpha in terms of gameplay loop. It shares a lot of of similarities with Valheim as well, though my aim is to have a more fast-paced game across the board, and a more light-hearted style. Currently I'm working on implementing the infrastructure to be able to script objects and NPC's (among other things.) The game is still in quite early development, there's tons of work ahead still, and for now I have to work on it in my spare time :)

[@Hoowwwww]

nice, the terrain looks indeed very sweet but ultimatly it'll be very limiting when you want to design some more structured pieces, like a dungeon, floors for a giant city etc.. i personally prefer going for tile map technique we use in 2D games with auto tiling, this way it lets you be creative with your worlds, and gives you the ability to reuse the terrain to design dungeons with interesting tile patterns maybe a mix between the two techniques is the play, i don't really know

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thanks! Your concern is one that I had as well. For POI's like castles, or underground dungeons, what I wanna try is quite similar to tiling, as in create pre-fabricated pieces (like rooms) and attach them to each other in a sort of 3D tilemap way. (These would then 'carve' out the terrain.) Not every POI will be this 'rigid' ofcourse, some may be simple 'camps' in which case things like tents will just be placed 'on top' of the terrain like you see here. Some may use some kind of hybrid etc. I'm definitely going to have to do some R&D on this to see what works best.

[@evannibbe9375]

Just export models as a .obj file from blender and then you can run a script on the raw text to convert it to your preferred format (since Wavefront.obj is human readable).

[@Benjabenjaaaa]

Great Video! keep it up

[@geardagumgeard]

i'm currently struggling with daynight cycle (buil-in rp) and cant reach that colorful sunrise/sunset effect at the position of the sun while the rest of the sky staying of cold color. Is there some trick, can you share?

[@GiantSlothGames]

Hmm, I didn't really do anything fancy, I wrote a shader for it that just creates gradients basically :D Depending on the vertical angle (pitch) from the pixel to the camera (always at 0,0,0 for skybox) I interpolate between the main sky gradient (some shades of blue essentially.) And then on top of that, based on the 'angular distance' (dot product basically) from a fragment to the sun-position, I blend a sun-color on top of that. Raise that blending factor to some power, like 2 or 3, to give it a more 'glowy' look and less like a linear gradient.

[@heyimamethyst]

Its so pretty!

[@juicedup14]

That gradient fog looks amazing 😍 Is it an asset or a free resource?

[@GiantSlothGames]

This is a custom engine, so no it’s custom :)

[@Fallstudio]

holy sh! this loooks so fckn cool!!

[@flowesome7]

so cool!

[@tastyham]

shouldn't the stars be hidden between the fog areas?

[@GiantSlothGames]

yeah they should fade approaching the horizon. WIP ;)

[@davidmcbride5357]

if you ask me players need more reasons to want explore everywhere like how botw put a collectible everywhere to people explore more or other games have mines so you need metals to make tools but anyway I believe you can handle it and make a beautiful game.

[@stickguy9109]

Making your own animations instead of using mixamo to make a game in your own engine? What a chad!

[@GiantSlothGames]

Hahah, I was afraid that mixamo anims weren't gonna fit the more 'wacky' combat animations xD Also editing/importing Mixamo anims in 3ds Max is a pain in the ass for some reason, another reason to switch haha.

[@arronshaw5358]

"Old shit" in the bookmarks bar

[@arsenbabaev1022]

Im making voxel raytraycer now, and its probably useless. Maybe ill try to make actual game with marching cubes, this actually looks great. P.S pls explain how do you interpolate colors? Average colors around each data point in small radius?

[@GiantSlothGames]

I now generate the colors beforehand during the world generation and store them in the data points/voxels. It looks way better for what I wanted to achieve than trying to interpolate colors between voxels because of the extra control.

[@DannyArchive]

You are very talanted

[@Morphexe]

Whats you generation timings for the chunks? I am curious how this impacts that.

[@GiantSlothGames]

I don't have any exact timings but it actually improved generation speed significantly (more than 3/4 times as fast). But that was mainly due to a few really poorly written algorithms in the previous generator, and a slow Perlin noise implementation. I didn't really take performance into account for the previous world generation since I knew it was just placeholder until I made something better. For reference: if you keep walking straight at normal speed (even a bit faster) you never see any chunks 'popping in' currently.

[@Morphexe]

@@GiantSlothGames i see that's interesting, i really like the approach you took here, might borrow your idea ahahah

[@NaughtyKlaus]

The stars and the asteroid belt doesn't spin in the right directions.

[@TheGodEmperorOfMankind_]

3:34 "ORK IN PROGRESS" *Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

[@UltiemeHack]

Interesting vid!

[@Povilaz]

Very interesting

[@stanleythehandsome5402]

ORK IN PROGRESS

[@GiantSlothGames]

10/10 cropping skills

[@stanleythehandsome5402]

@@GiantSlothGames I couldn't help but imagine Saruman's ork factory while watching

[@Tbjbu2]

looks cool

[@THEKALMED]

This is Mad

[@yellowduckgamedev]

Damn does the game look natural now

[@amps9978]

wist niet dat je nl was :)

[@brammoreels]

Giant Sloth Games stock when? 📈

[@GiantSlothGames]

IPO soon

[@xenen9797]

what is the song at the begining

[@GiantSlothGames]

Morning wood by edvard grieg haha

[@RazixStyle]

Goede keus om blender te gebruiken ;)

[@greenKac]

are you francophone (because you pronounced poisson correctly) ? And THIS WORLD GENERATION IS GREAT !!!!!

[@GiantSlothGames]

I'm Belgian, my main language is dutch but we get a lot of french in school because our country is technically bilingual. But my french is pretty bad tbh xD

[@SlothInTheHat]

hello fellow sloth

[@GiantSlothGames]

Greetings!

[@stellar5706]

Are you using a custom game engine?

[@GiantSlothGames]

yes sir

[@stellar5706]

@@GiantSlothGames Noice

[@alopmemes1964]

Are you developing the game in unity or in a Game engine? Or do u use your own?

[@GiantSlothGames]

I use my own engine.

[@aaron3_218]

Algo help

[@yakanashe]

yo lmao jij bent nederlands???

[@GiantSlothGames]

Belgisch ;)

[@slBrelaz]

Consider not doing a normal environment for the starting area, most people will judge your game and set their expectations for your game based on their first hour of gameplay. If you want the player to feel in awe of the environment as they explore, then you're best off doing that right from the start, otherwise people will judge and quit your game (maybe thinking it's too boring) because you wanted to start them off somewhere 'normal'.

[@GiantSlothGames]

A more earthly environment hopefully doesn't mean that it will be boring. If it ends up being boring then I'll definitely change it. I do want the 'epicness' to ramp up over time, with the end being the climax. I feel like a lot of games have this habit of frontloading all their epicness to the start (for the reasons you mentioned.) but then they kind of become a drag because they're having a hard time to one-up themselves. But I agree this is definitely something to be aware of, and this is still good feedback. Nothing is 100% set in stone and it's definitely possible that I'll shuffle some stuff around.

[@pimpoplays]

what is your game engine???

[@GiantSlothGames]

It's a custom one :)

[@noahdirksen3623]

What engine are you using?

[@GiantSlothGames]

I use my own custom engine.

[@noahdirksen3623]

@@GiantSlothGames yo thats epic, I've been trying to follow the 'Sparky Engine' as a guide for making an engine, how did you do it?

[@StiekemeHenk]

Valheim?

[@Michel2003g]

lol, you're dutch?

[@jenspieters123]

THIRD

[@GiantSlothGames]

Thou hath failed again! My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

[@egretfx]

Sorry, What engine are u using?