New place, new skin.

If you haven't followed me on Discord, you might be wondering why I kind-of disappeared for a short while... 

Short story: I (Salireths) moved to another country, to another side of the planet entirely. This was a big moment in my life, and just like with every big move like that, it disrupts normal work for some time, because there is always a ton of stuff to do IRL, from sitting in planes and airports for hours, then finding a house for rent, to buying simplest kitchenware... I'm not going to go in detail where and why I moved, because this blog isn't about me personally, its about the game we all share the passion for! Feel free to ask me in Discord or in PMs if you're curious though! :}

So, after all the IRL running around is more or less done, I finally sat down and started doing art again, yay! And oh boy that is some good work I'm doing now, it makes me so excited, I can't wait to see the new player characters running around in the game :D

The new creature models still require textures, aka skins, and this is what I'm painting now, by hand, scale after scale - all hand crafted. 

You might be wondering why is the texture black and white? Well, technically all the textures in our game project are black and white, even rocks and grass. But before rendering it, the game takes those B-W textures and applies special gradient maps to designated areas, colorizing them to any color range that player, designer, or random chance has chosen. It's like Photoshop's gradient map adjustment, but a bit more advanced. This little trick doesn't only produce a ton of variety out of the box, it also makes the process of creating textures much faster, and in the end it all comes down to giving the game it's unique stylized appearance.

Also, thank you so much for supporting the project this month, we are also working on adding simple enemies to shoot at, getting the combat system somewhat feature-complete, and started prototyping our player progression (knowledge tree) interface, but more about that in the next posts... So see you soon!