This reply has been copied over from our Polycount thread where we are also sharing our development progress with this project!
To start off I’ll post my progress and development of the two key levels in our demo thus far:
- the Sewing Room, where our player character weaves fabrics, sews clothes and dresses up in preparation for battle
- the Silken Forest, the tutorial hunting ground for the player to harvest crafting materials for making fabric and embellishing their clothing
Blockouts have all been done in Unreal Engine 5.3.2, which is our engine of choice for this project.
Our game will take place from an isometric-like camera angle (we’ve run into problems with lighting when trialling a true isometric angle unfortunately - no shadows casting), so the blockouts have been created with this in mind.
Old camera angle
However, we have plans to develop a more sophisticated camera system that could allow the player to perhaps zoom in on the character whenever they want to admire the crafted details of their clothing creations, or facilitate the ability to switch into a third-person camera.
Sewing Room
Our protagonist’s workshop of wonders is where they work their magic for style and in style. It’s a humble little abode for now, but that doesn’t stop it from being filled to the brim with this tailor’s creative crafts and a magnificent wardrobe.
This room started out quite big, mostly due to my own scale blindness ^^;
Following feedback from our initial Concept Presentation in class, I scaled back the dimensions to be more snug and cosy, something more fitting for our character’s very first personal studio.
Below is a quick diagram I made to abstract and summarise the layout of the sewing room.
Silken Forest
These woods are the domain of silkworms and moths with trees all adorned with delicate gossamer threads woven by its inhabitants. Beyond silk, weavers can also find other soft flora for their fabrics, such as cotton and flax.
The forest is a more underdeveloped location as of this post, as we still require more concept art and development to fully realise the vision. As I will be responsible for foliage production I have started out roughing some concepts and ideas for generic foliage population.
So far I’ve taken most of my inspiration for the foliage from various characteristics of different silk moth variants. The generic foliage will be a lot simpler, as I am considering reserving the slightly more detailed leaf designs and compositions for the mini-boss we have planned at the end of the forest, where the player will encounter a “queen moth” of sorts at the home nest of the forest’s silk moths and worms:
This diagram from our most recent presentation summarises the overall intended flow for the forest level:
For this segment of the game, gameplay-wise it’s quite inspired by games like Hades at the moment (huge fan of the hack-and-slash combat!), only without the roguelike element of procedurally-generated rooms because that’s a bit beyond our scope and skill ATM. So the level here is somewhat akin to a dungeon crawl I guess, although it’s not actually in a dungeon of course! The player can obtain materials like silk by defeating the silk moths and worms, which they can use to then create silk fabric and garments.
