Over the last year I have been developing LUUN, a game in the same vein as 7 Days to Die and early Ark Survival. I have released a very ‘Early Access’ version on itch.io for players to try out.
LUUN takes place in a world of islands. Sail between island to explore, gather, loot and find technologies to expand your crafting abilities. Different enemy AI, lots of various biomes and POIs along with more features are planned for future updates.
I am using Unreal 4.27, Voxel Plugin, UDS, AutoSettings, along with some asset pack/Megascans ground vegetation and sounds. The rest of the content I built using Blender, Gimp, Audacity and Unreal.
The ocean is built using the standard UE water system.
I will discuss more about implementation of these systems in future posts and videos, so subscribe if you are interested.
Next upcoming features:
Tool Harvesting and Building systems
Wildlife
Updated Masculine and Feminine Characters with proper character creator
Along with the Trello Roadmap, I update the devlogs on itch.io frequently, that’s a good place to stay updated on the game from day to day.
I posted the first video devlog. In this video I go over the plans for the game, the current state of development, what I am working on now and future plans. The video finishes with several minutes of gameplay of the current build.
In this video I show you the method I use to create game ready assets from scratch in blender for my unreal game.
I go over how I plan, sculpt, retopo, bake, export and import the asset into unreal.
Since the last devlog, I’ve released a couple builds addressing the inventory system, smoothing out the interaction and tool usage. Once that was done, it was time to update the artwork on the primitive harvest tool as it is used to harvest wood and stone, necessary for the upcoming building system. I thought it would be interesting to show my workflow for building these assets.
I start off by discussing the research I did for planning this asset, then move on to Blender, where I model and sculpt the asset using the modeling, sculpting and spline tools.
I add materials and details to the asset, then show the process I use to retopologize the object using the RetopoFlow add-on for Blender.
I then use Blender’s UV unwrapping tools to create a UV map for my low-res object. After this, I bake the procedural materials down into a diffuse texture and normal map texture, showing the settings I use for this.
I next export the image textures, then export the FBX file for the mesh object. I import this into Unreal, set up a simple material with the baked textures, add collision and integrate the asset into gameplay.
This video is a pretty good snapshot of the process I use for creating static assets for in-game. This asset took about 6 hours overall to do, with a few breaks for dinner and to play with the doggo.
Doggo breaks are an essential workflow for productivity. It’s also really nice to see an asset created from beginning to end in a single video. An artist’s process is always fascinating.
I look forward to (hopefully) learning more about LUUN!
