Screen Shot Saturday - December 14 (Patreon)

Greetings all. It's been another flat out week working on Innkeep. ;-) I've made some pretty significant progress with the exterior, and also finally learnt how to use a tablet. 

After finally figuring out some of the shortcuts and things you need to use a tablet, the first simple thing I tried my hand at was some basic rocks to liven up the steppe area by the road and cliff edge. 

A few base types could then be flipped around, rotated, scaled, altered, clumped together etc to get some variation.

I then decided to get started on the grass. I created my own simple grass brush, and then using the tablet again, I followed a little guide for size to get perspective, and hand brushed the entire landscape. 

This was a pretty big job...

Here you can see a bit more in terms of layers. I didn't quite achieve the hillocky look that I wanted, but closer up it looks pretty good.

Open this image in a new tab so you can see how it looks at native (100% zoom) resolution. 

I also made a tree for the starting area. 

Now that I was more confident with the tablet I decided to re-do the slate roof texture. Just to give you a rough idea, this was probably 6 hours work by itself.

Tiled and with some color adjustments. Not perfect, but better than what I had before.

These were the old guys. I think the ridges on them are nice, but that is something I can re-create later with the tablet after I have everything placed down.

One thing led to another, and I ended up reworking the inn exterior as well. It was simply too boxy looking, the result of slavishly trying to make the exterior match the interior 1:1. Instead, I was going to focus more on aesthetics, in the belief that the players won't care much so long as everything looks cool.

Here's the new shape. You can see that the roof line has been broken up, and more of the central wall is visible.

The old boxy inn for comparison. ;p

Here we have the cast shadows back in, and the new texture on (apart from the little window roofs). Zoomed closer it looks fine, but at this zoom (not that you would see this in game necessarily), it looks a bit like scales! I -think- this is because the ridges are not clearly defined. A bit of work with the stylus is still needed to give it more depth and texture. But the basis is there.

I also did a bit more work on the wench character. Ben Chandler was kind enough to touch up the boots and give the hair more definition, which I duly copied. ;-( ) The apron is looking too busy still, and the color still needs to pop a bit more here and there, but this is getting close. 

Whats next?

Over the next week I'll try and get this massive exterior image finished. There's three jobs that I have to do.

1. Finishing up the inn exterior. Rooftop and wall texturing.

2. Using my tablet skills to create a kick-ass layered mountain range.

3. Final detailing.

With these items done, I can then start cutting things up and porting it into the game files, and work on walking around getting everything hooked together. That will be super exciting. ;p. Of course, there will be further details and things to add in the future. Maybe some creepers. Some more rocks. The well. Some wood for chopping. Etc. etc. But they can be done later and simply layered on top of what is already done. For now, I just want to make sure the bones  are all in, and that everything is aligned and looking reasonably good. This allows me to move on with the process of making the game demo.

See you next week!