Now, confined to indoors for much of the time, I could get some focussed work done. I finally decided a working title for the project. Since its about a young mage on a mission to save his basecamp, a name like "In Crisis" seemed appropriate. I will go with this for now. But yes, do put in your suggestions and I will reconsider.
Now, the primary and immediate objective is to get a working prototype. I have been tinkering with for Godot Engine some time and wading through a lot of Tutorials on YouTube. It seems there has been a recent upgrade to ver 4.0. So an active engine project seems to be in place for our purpose.
The tilng mechanism, especially the isometric way of thnking took a little tile to grasp but I could do a quick blocking and smoke testing as below. Going by the standards, The tiles are 2:1 ratio (x 128: y 64). Another thing that was crucial to get my head around was the Y-Sort.
Next, comes the level building (again we are still prototyping) for which I need visual assets. My first route was to use an AI tool to generate them but I quickly found out that either my prompts were no good or these tools just sucked. Also there came up a concern from some corner about AI infringing IP of creators. PHEW ! There, I kept this method aside for the moment.
The next viable thing to do was to look up some references in a gold mine like Pinterest and build by own library. I realised it will be a slow death but I was in no hurry as they say 'The Soul is immortal and Time is endless'. Heh !
The posts in pinteres were enough to thrust me into some asset smithing. And voila the first batch of modular brick and mortar made indegenously in the very powerful but accessible too - Blender
The geometries are pretty basic but the procedural textures are a little involved. The reason is to make sure that the same textures adapts to a multiple different asset shapes.
The initial levels are placed in a large hall, a courtyard, a library and a sewer. So there is probably another half a dozen sets I need to make before getting them.
So that's all for now folks. Stay tuned and subscribe to get updated !
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