Development Log

After the chickens came out fairly well, I thought I'd try to model an animal that can be hunted and will be roaming the forests. I'm pretty happy with the deer model I created, but I still need to do more texture work and build the skeleton and animations.
 
Modeling organic items that are not trees is fairly difficult compared to the buildings that I've been creating for the game. As a programmer, I've always avoided trying to model things like people and animals. Straight lines are easy, correctly proportioned curvy shaped things that deform with muscles, fur, and hair are hard for me. Unwrapping them for texturing is also slightly more tedious.
 
Here's the deer model in the game. More to come...
 

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I've just got done building the artwork and writing some of the code for creation for livestock pens. Here's an image of what they look like. Next I'll be working on the rest of the code to manage the animals and use them as food. The livestock will grow and reproduce just like the citizens in the town.

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After finishing my changes to the citizens, the next thing I thought I would add to the game is livestock. The game will allow adding pastures where you can raise chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep. You'll be able to slaughter them for food and possibly produce other products from them, such as leather, wool, and eggs.
 
The process starts with modeling and animating a low polygon animal. I chose a chicken.
 
The process of creating a 3D model for a game is unduly complicated. First a triangle mesh that defines the shape of the object needs to be created. The mesh then needs to be unwrapped so that a 2D texture can be applied to it. After being unwrapped, the actual texture has to be painted to give the object color. An ambient occlusion map is also rendered at this point to give the model better shading and lighting in the game. Once all that's done virtual bones are added to the model and the mesh is weighted to the bones so that it can be animated. Only then can animations can be created by moving the bones.

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As a C++ programmer, I find that when I'm writing code for myself, I like it to be well designed, maintainable, and as simple as possible. Unfortunately as I continue to add features, the application gets bigger and new requirements or unforeseen design issues tend to lead to re-factoring. I have a hard time leaving messy code messy, and I don't tend to hack features in, so every once in a while I clean up. It's way more fun to add new visuals and features. But these rewrites need to be done, otherwise the source code becomes an unmaintainable bug prone mess.

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So not many will remember, but I had been working on a game called zAftermath, an action RPGish type game with zombies. After working on it for about 7 months, I realized a few things. One, is that there are too many small indie zombie games out there. Second, the one I was making wasn't actually fun and I was just adding features to try to fix it.

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