Update Characters Workflow
Greetings to the growing community of Steemit. Today we are excited and proud to present you some changes in our Escape Team Game project that we believe will improve the gameplay and will be appreciated by the future Escape Team players.
What is it about?
We have decided to change the artistic style of the game thinking that one of our main objectives is that as much people as possible can play Escape Team, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), without having a gamer computer, as we already said it in the presentation of our project, the game is aimed not only at gamers but also at anyone who wants to have fun and earn money sharing their stories lived through the game on Steemit, Whaleshares, or in the social network of your choice; using the systems that we are implementing: Replay System, Photomode and the Comic Module.
The Comic Module also led us to make the decision of changing the art of the game given that the ability to share stories made by the players through comics, graphic novels, memes, among others, lends itself to a fresher style; hence we have adopted the cartoon style for our characters and environments.
The possibilities offered by a cartoon style to make a game much lighter than with realistic environments and more complex characters at the topological level are powerful, an example of this is Fortnite, which partly owes its success to the accessibility that many people have to play it.
Optimization:
The fact that a game team adopts the cartoon style for a project does not mean that their game necessarily is optimized so that anyone can play it, regardless of the equipment they have (pc, playstation, mobile, etc). It is necessary to keep in mind that in every step of the development of Escape Team Game this objective is present and that we work daily on it. That’s why we have done different tests with a character model to reach a lowpoly result that is attractive, but does not represent a great load for the game. The Escape Team Game environments are also being optimized for this purpose, but in this advance we want to present to you the rigorous process that we have done to reach a final result as well as the cartoon style that we like so much.
Background:
Initially a character was elaborated using the addon of Manuel Bastioni Laboratory 1.6.1. for Blender, which gave us the chance to do quick retarget tests inside Unreal Engine with the characters of the Paragon pack. But from the beginning, always with the word "optimization" in mind, we made several adjustments to the character removing some topology from the inside of the mouth and a large part of the eyelash, and leaving as few polygons as possible that were not part of the character's clothing, thus reaching a total of 38,789 triangles:
At that time we wanted to work with this workflow mixing the cartoon style of the character we had achieved with realistic environments that we would build from packs such as Soul City that are inside the Unreal Engine launcher. This is how our presentation video for the Steemit account was born:
However, that word: "optimization" and all the conceptual content that it has within a videogame, continued to drill our brains until finally we wanted to continue making tests. We decided to model a character from scratch, that was a little more cartoony, very lowpoly, but attractive to the eye. The result that we are proud to present today has only 6,850 triangles, that is, 31,939 triangles less than the previous one.
This a very light character that we are sure will provide the opportunity to many more people to play Escape Team. All our characters will be made in this same workflow, and the assets will be 3D models that will be link up to this style without ceasing to be attractive to our players. This change also means our environments will be 100% cartoon style, without ceasing to reflect the apocalyptic atmosphere that surrounds the game concept.
What do you think of these changes? Let us know what you think about the final style that you will enjoy inside Escape Team Game. If you have any suggestions or want to collaborate, we will be very grateful for your comments.
The Escape Team Game team: @namra, @fanisk, @matuca, @elguille and @valki
