Blog # 2 Engine, Art, & World
Engine Discussion
Unity’s Logo. Engine for building games.
Happy March gamers and developers, it is the beginning of another fantastic month which means it is time to give everyone an update of our game development journey. February brought VG2 great progress, my brother and I discussed which engine we would ultimately build upon; we are pleased to announce our development journey will be in Unity. Unity is a great engine to build one of our first games in, it has been tried and tested many times, developed many tools to make the process smoother, and has a thriving community. The team wanted to make sure whichever engine we chose there would be a large community of help to potentially find unique solutions to problems the team encounters. With all that we couldn’t ignore Unity as the engine for our first game. For those that are curious we chose to use the Universal Render Pipeline, because of the added benefit of increasing our game’s accessibility This was ultimately the hardest decision as HDURP is tough to pass up.
Art Stylization
Next on the list was for my brother and I to decide on an art style for the game; my brother wanted one that was easy on the eyes but not too flashy and I agreed. The reason for this was that VG2, being a two person team, wanted to make sure the art style would be easy to replicate by lots of artists as we hope to have an additional artist join the team. The team ultimately landed on a semi realistic art style. This art style would make it easy to blend elements of realism allowing an artist to deviate from rigid representations giving the artist freedom to interpretation and expression all while keeping key features.
A dark forest in a conceptually semi realistic art style. Credit goes to Darkmoon-art via pixabay.
World Building
Putting the missing puzzle pieces together. Image Credit goes to Franz26 via pixaby
With the art style chosen we were able to move onto art acquisition. At VG2 our goal is to do everything in house but, this isn’t quite feasible. We quickly realized we would need outside help, for right now we have bought some asset packs that we agreed would need little to no changes from our own artist. These packs included various nature themes giving us an array of trees, bushes, grasses and other natural effects to begin world building. Now that VG2 had its hands on the missing puzzle pieces, we went to work on laying out the world the player would explore, building key areas where some of the game's action would take place. The team took a break after long hours of designing the world to take it all in; my brother and I began to envision several scenarios or moments players would experience in our game. I couldn’t help but think that most developers reached this moment, a moment to truly be proud of their work, experiencing a rush of creativity and excitement.
Feedback
Another successful month went by before we knew it. Looking back it feels like we didn’t get much done but now, here, writing it all out. VG2 can truly say progress was made; our team hopes that this productivity continues in the hopes that our game is delivered into the hands of the gaming community. As always links to our social networking accounts are down below please feel free to comment, share, and enjoy the content we make. VG2 loves to hear feedback from its community. Let us know what you feel about us using unity or maybe our art style choice.
