“Dauntless games, another barrel asset? Show me more of that awesome robot from last week!”
Well you’re in luck!
Last week we did indeed post the robot in its offensive stance, this week we added the robot in its defensive stance. The robot has the ability to switch states that alter the way the character is played. the offensive Robot is a damage dealer, while the defensive version is a tanky character that can take a punch.
We wanted the robot to feel like a impenetrable Roman warrior with shields covering his every side. He helps the other human by making sure the big guys stay focused on him and stunning the little guys so the other player can get in closer without worrying.
If you like to learn more about the gameplay mechanics let us know.
An update to one of the playable co-op characters.
While his weapon is still under construction, this time he did bring his posh top hat along. Feel free to leave a reply and let us know what you think 🙂
Game development takes time, but to share more stuff with you guys we’re happy to announce the official Dauntless Games YouTube channel 🙂
We will be showing small bits of ‘work in progress’ gameplay, effects, animations, goofiness and what ever else we can think of!
Dauntless Games is developing a two player couch coop adventure and here is a small glimpse of the ‘cooperative mortar’. The two players have to work together to fire a mortar at their target, in this case a set of poor barrels and crates who never saw it coming.
Let us know what you think or what you would like to see in the future.
We have uploaded an early version of our player character models on Sketchfab.
Feel free to give us your feedback for the next iteration!
We will be posting more of our ingame models & work in progress in the upcoming weeks.
If you have suggestions for next uploads or questions, do not hesitate to ask in the comments!
Creating materials is a critical part of asset production for they can make or break the finest-looking models. Unfortunately, creating the materials can be repetitive and time consuming and the problem arises as early as the modeling stage when you plan out your details.
No matter if the materials are stylistic or realistic, the process of authoring multiple maps across several software packages is a lot of work. This can quickly turn into a troubleshooting process instead of the creative pleasure it should be!
For those who aren’t already familiar with Substance Designer, the beauty of this particular piece of softwareis that you can take care of a lot of texture maps at once through a node-based workflow.
Node-based workflow makes messy layers a thing of the past.
Substance designer comes with many generators that the users have at their disposal to create all kinds of effects.These generators use map-based inputs that are baked from either a high or low poly model.
Custom wood edge wear effect applied to multiple maps at once.
Substance Designer really shines when creating custom effects. We create our own generators completely with exposed parameters and custom in- and outputs. These give us the advantage of creating the effect we like once and hooking it up to many different assets. Spending hours roughing up your models in Zbrush is a thing of the past.
To take this a step further, we create custom material generators for our projects. Besides alleviating us from a lot of repetitive work,it comes with the added bonus of having consistent looking assets. All custom created materials and effects are stored within a library and can be used anytime.
With a library we only have to worry about supplying the right types of input. We can, for example, bake out material ID maps, which are color-coded maps that ‘identify’ the type of material for the generators.
Materials generated based on the color input.
Maps like the curvature or position map are used to mask and modulate the effects, giving us a lot of control over the look and feel of the assets, indistinguishable from handcrafted textures.
Multiple maps working together.
When things change in the project, updating the assets to meet the new standards is a lot less challenging. Materials and effects can easily be added to the library as we see fit, which allows us to be flexible throughout the project.
Although Substance Designer has a steep learning curve, it’s fun, intuitive and fast once you get into it, making it well worth the time and effort.
Next blog post we’ll share our experiences with visual programming in Substance. One of the things we will discuss is how to run multiple effects under one slider.
If you have any questions or want to share useful tips yourself, comment below!
Dauntless Games 