This was an exciting week for us here at OgreWare!
With the Gordian Flowchart mostly in place, I changed my focus from narrative design to visual this week – partly just to keep myself from getting rusty with Blender, which I hadn’t touched in months. My task there was to create the 3D assets for our first zone, which we’re codenaming “Hilly Greens.” I created a dozen or so new models, some of which I really love:
Partway through the week, though, I found that I was pretty unhappy with the color palette overall. I’d thrown all the “early zones” assets into one mockup file to get a look at it, and…
It didn’t really strike me as bad, just underwhelming. So we decided to overhaul the color palette and give ourselves a bit more of a range of colors to play with. And we think the models ended up looking a lot more striking:
We still haven’t revised all the models with the new textures, but we really love the results so far. We’ll share a test scene when we have everything updated!
It was an exciting week for our design and code side too: we got to do our first real dungeon test, complete with hidden rooms, secrets, out-of-the-way loot, and of course a dungeon boss. I got to be the first tester for this, and it was so much fun. I actually felt like I was playing an ARPG and going through an early dungeon. I felt the danger, the excitement, the tension between “am I gonna make it? I’m not sure I’m gonna make it” and the cheering and swearing following defeating the boss. It was actually a little exhilarating.
The actual game is still quite a ways away, but this felt like an important milestone: I played it, and it was fun. That might sound simple, but anyone who has built a game and really put time into making it run well will tell you, there is nothing quite like that “oh my god, it works” feeling.
Thanks for following along. Have a great week!