Making this house a home
In week three, I have been working on the main house that the player will be spending a majority of their time in.
I imagine the player setting up shop inside of an old farm house. Who’s house is it? The current plan is to make the house belong to some distant relative of the player. They are keeping an eye on the old place while something evil lurks in the shadows. The house should serve as a “mostly safe” point for the player. The plan is to have the player complete certain tasks to keep the house safe and secure.
Here are some pictures of the current iteration of the house. I intend on adding some smaller details when I have more time. I will keep the house simple in the beginning and focus more on game mechanics, map layout, etc.
All of the textures I have been using are from either ambientcg.com or textures.com. AmbientCG is an awesome site that offers 100% free textures using Creative Commons CC0. Textures.com offers 15 free daily images, but does require a subscription for more credits.
In order to streamline the creation process, I am reusing an old material setup that I have used in previous projects. The idea is to use a material node setup called “World Aligned Textures”. Essentially, the textures are projected onto the object making it easy to seamlessly connected textures. This allows me to quickly drag-and-drop textures onto objects for quick prototyping.
As far as I can tell, there are three main drawbacks to this method:
1. Sometime textures are oriented incorrectly
Because the textures are projected onto the object based on world space, some surfaces might not be in the orientation you want them to be. You can rotate the actual texture files themselves, but you are rotating that texture everywhere it is used.
2. Your object has to be non-moving
As you can tell in the gif above, if you move the object, the texture will realign itself. This is because the object’s location in the world has moved and it is being re-projected.
3. I don’t know how this method affects performance.
That’s all for this week
I will likely keep coming back to the house to add some more detail here and there. The next goal is to refine the layout of the map. I need to get an idea of how far the player will need to walk between objectives.
Thanks for reading!