[Unity WIP] "The City"

[Campaignjunkie]

Making a Thief / investigative news / videography Unity FPS for the "Justice" compo over at Super Friendship Club. Collab with game dev partner in crime Eddie Cameron, he does game code and I do art / level design.

You have to use your video camera to get good footage, then edit it into a TV news story afterwards. It's like Thief / Beyond Good and Evil / iMovie. In terms of visuals, I'm thinking like Thief 2.5, a steampunk city infected by mass media. We're targeting the Unity web player, so I'm doing mostly diffuse shaders only with simple lightmaps. Also using a lot of textures from PhilipK's "ancient collection" with its generous "do whatever the fuck you want" license.

I've found the workflow to be kind of annoying compared to BSP, I have to UV everything twice? Stupid lightmaps...

Anyway. Here's a dev log of sorts.

Are the modeled bricks really distracting / a really bad decision that conflicts with lightmaps?

[Campaignjunkie]

Progress report -- map layout blockout going okay. I'm trying to limit the size of the level, but allow room for expansion if I need it. This part will be a free-roaming city thing that connects the mission areas. Never knew lightmaps took up so much texture memory.

[Campaignjunkie]

Update. Planning different styles for the mini-neighborhoods. "Hightowne" will be tall majestic structures with greenish lightting and "Downtowne" will be the ramshackle mess before you.

[dux]

I love how Thief this looks.

[twiz]

Are the modeled bricks really distracting / a really bad decision that conflicts with lightmaps?

I don't think the sticking-out-bricks look good. For me they just draw attention to the flatness of the rest of the wall. I think you'd need a much higher density of extruded bricks to make it look realistic/good. I vote to leave the wall flat!

[KungFuSquirrel]

I think you could get away with it if it were much more subtle. Right now it looks like a really simple block extruding out (and is). If you made it more shallow and gave it a bit of a bevel on the edge, it might blend in a bit better.

[ShadoW_]

Nice progress from initial pictures to the last one.