Interior Decorating & Terraforming For Dummies

Work on the amorphous goal of "making the game look less like shit" continues this month with reasonable success. Note that the goal isn't "make the game look good" ... I'm neither that ambitious nor that foolish.

A brief foray into the world of post-processing didn't yield any results that I was stoked about, and I just wasn't having much fun with it so I moved on from that pretty quickly. I plan to take another stab at it before release, though. So, no obnoxious lens flare screenshots this month but hold yr horses, they're coming. Probably.

Interior Art Assets

I considered shipping v0.4 with the placeholder interior art assets, but I need the 3d modeling practice and it seemed like low hanging fruit in the pursuit the goal so that's what I've spent the most time on recently. I wouldn't call the results impressive, but I do think it's a significant improvement, which is all I'm going for here. Here are some of the interior assets hanging around a test scene to give you a feel for the vibe:

Some of the new modular interior assets

I'm still working on getting all of these assets placed into the game proper. It's taking a while because it's boring but it should only take another day or two of focus to get it done.

Planet Redesign

To break things up while I'm tediously placing art assets I decided to start turning my attention towards the planet models. These are currently shitty not-even-spheres with slapped on textures from Google image search, so I was pretty confident that I could do something to improve on that.

All of the inspiration and most of the code comes from this fantastic tutorial series by the Bob Ross of programming himself, Sebastion Lague. I'm a big fan of his, and I've had the idea to use this procedural flavor of planet generation for a while. The style feels right for Black Road Sky, and someone else already did the work, so win-win.

I'm still working on getting this integrated into Black Road Sky, but here are some early results:

Some Test Planets

Coming Up Next

It'll just be more of the same in the coming month, placing the rest of those interior pieces and finishing up the planet generator. That will still leave a lot of graphical work left to do, but I think it should be good enough for now.