Hello all! Here’s a miniteaser of the game I’ve been working on for awhile now. Feel free to leave comments, questions, and critiques!
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Love the theme and general feel of the game. reminds me of “genesis” back on old systems 
keep it up!
The theme and the BGM really works well together. Any particular reason for choosing Unreal for gamedev?
No offense just curious, because it is low poly so i thought Unity can cover it.
Would love to hear your feedback, and thanks in advance!
Thanks for the kind comments. I chose Unreal Engine 4 for a variety of reasons, the main one being I have been using it since it first came out. I was using UDK at the time for displaying 3d models, and was messing around with Unity learning coding, but Unreal Engine 4 grabbed me with its out-of-the-box capabilities, powerful material editor, and blueprints made a great transition from being primarily an artist to coding. This was also around the time when Unreal Engine 4 was only $20 a month, cancel anytime, and Unity was $700 to a thousand+ a year locked in subscription. I had made the terrible mistake at the time of purchasing the unity license thinking I’d have all the time in the world to make a game, but ended up getting a job so it was basically money thrown down the drain. I’ve supported EPIC ever since(locked in subscriptions are the bane of the world for individuals outside of corporations). C++ is also theoretically faster due to it being lower level(arguable in most code, but for having potentially hundreds of thousands of entities in a procedural / dynamic generated map, any slight increase helps. You’re technically not locked into any particular system since you have access to the source code. Rimworld for example, was built on Unity and ended up doing a bunch of tricks for performance, such as splitting the map into chunks for floodfills and querying, but so far I have yet to notice any performance drops in calling such functions on the entire map. It may end up being the case that I do add further tricks later on however, since there’s always the potential for expansion and complexity management. Definitely don’t do something like floodfill or BFS in blueprints though, it WILL lag and is such a pain in the *** with the countless amounts of nodes vs what ended up being just a few lines in C++ (I actually made much of the systems I’m using in C++ today originally as blueprints years back before I started using C++). My only criticism of Unreal Engine vs Unity is many of the resources and guides are skewed towards blueprints, with the learning curve being much steeper for their API in C++. Something Unity doesn’t really have since everyone’s forced to be on the same page with C#. Not a huge issue since you can write algorithms in any language if you know the general syntax, but just something I’ve noticed when trying to look up anything related to Unreal’s C++ side of things compared to blueprints.
The art style is an evolving formation itself of trying to come up with something that is original enough compared to much of the faceted, broken faced lowpoly stuff currently in popularity with indies (funnily enough, having broken shading actually INCREASES performance cost due to vertexs being duplicated in game engines during render at split shading groups and UV seams, though polycounts are basically a nonissue at this point besides mobile, draw calls are the bane), while still maintaining enough simplicity that it’s not too time-consuming to do as a one-man team. Having less bones and deformations is also an added performance benefit besides much less time spent modeling, rigging, animating, hence their Rayman-inspired floating arms/legs. There is also the case of forming an art style that is abstract enough that it avoids issues of the Uncanny Valley. The more realistic something is, the more time and money you’ll have to spend on areas like facial animations, motion capture, etc to not make them feel like robots. Even with something as simple as the current character models I have still need to be updated to have the ability to blink, and potentially eyebrow animations for emotions. And even then for large studios realism still is a persistent problem. Stylized works also tend to age better over time, and I think games have reached a point where a stylized game made today will age much better over the years than say the PS1/N64 era. All you have to do is look at how much longer the current console systems have been out compared to previous cycles. I’ve also been designing the art assets in a way that maintains a level of consistency in detail, with potential to refine over time as the game itself becomes more system complete. Very loose hand-painted gestural textures that give an added level of detail but without breaking readibility and without adding too much noise as to decrease the interest in dominate shapes is something on my eventual to-do list. Something perhaps similar to how loosely painted the furniture in the Sims 4, Wind Waker, or Animal Crossing is vs the very tightly refined brush work of World of Warcraft as an example.
Here’s a little update after adding in some rain!
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loved EVERYTHING i saw, except the helicopter xD, but i take it thats a standin for something else? since its got a whole medieval vibe going on, imme ring this bell so i get updates, keep up the great work and hope to see a little demo of (i saw waves so i take it its sort of a colony sim defense?) the first 5 waves or something?
anyway hope this is still ongoing and keep up the great work!
Greetings @Deathstick; I hope you’re doing well, and Happy New Year! Your game is looking fantastic from what you’ve showcased so far! I would love to know if there have been any updates to “Colony Survival.” 