So that turned out to be a massively longer delay behind the scenes. I tried a lot of stuff but ultimately nothing was working out with the systems I was playing with.
Stuff was jank, the gameplay was not gelling togehter in my head and all around I was not satisfied with anything.
Now I’m excited and interested and happy but everything has changed and yet some things are once again back too what they were.
I have an idea of what’s going to ‘strike joy’ for me with this project now.
Silly Proof of Concept for rendering method
So now we are doing things with more or less totally 3D assets and models, but with a specific style reminiscent of the pre-rendered graphics of late SNES era games. In particular I’m taking cues from Super Mario RPG and the seven stars.
This was mostly a proof of concept to see if I could make something even ‘palatable’ to me and I still had to sleep on it to decide that this does indeed work good enough for me.
Also switching to a stylized 3D look gives me ENORMOUS flexibility for optimizations, performance and visual flexibility.
Lighting, Day and Night Cycles, and a lot more of environmental and easy rendering tricks open themselves up too me.
But all of that is honestly nice extras I could have worked around compared too the real flexibility I get from this style change.
Sprites I now must admit are TERRIBLE for the kind of customization and variability I wanted to accomplish. I did a decent shake last time but I think I hit my limits of what I could really pull off with 2D easily.
Doing the body generation in 3D with primitives is going to give me a lot more options.
Not all options going to be the best of course, a friend already found some wacky results.
But I think the potential here is worth it.
I’m gonna iterate on the body generator scripts for a bit and probably release a build that lets folk make their own critters once I’ve got that working.
It will be a pretty wonky and less featured version of spore too start with but I’ve got big plans.