I remarked to a friend recently that solo projects are the place for bad production decisions.
That’s exactly what I did this weekend!
The title character Esperanto is a 95th C telepath, and I wanted to make a cutscene featuring four of her teammates. These are characters I’d conceptualized way before I started on this game, and thought about the limits of using my own costume creator.
They are:
Bright Chronometron – a tall, slim, handsomely moody Japanese dude with a psychedelic shirt with moving patterns (Like The Doctor from The Authority’s jacket)
Bastionette – a chunky amazon warrior with bright neon futuristic armor
Teddy Megaton – a teddy bear in an army hat
Boltzmann Colony 9 – a giant monstrous figure with no head and a moving pretzel shaped brain floating in mid air, owing a little bit to Validus from the Legion of Superheroes.
And at this point I have the modular sets by PO-Art from the Fab store to work with. I can programme, create shaders, and do some very simple 3D modelling with primitives in Unreal, but everything else I have to solve using the fine art of kitbashing.
Oh dear! Shouldn’t be too hard, right?
Kitbashing means making do with whatever I can find, scrounging around for meshes, textures and whatever helps to bring my vision into the game. When I modded Freedom Force I sharpened these skills by re-purposing game assets. Here I’m working in the wider pool of Unreal Engine, with access to the Fab asset store and other online resources.
Chronometron was up first. I had slacks, Business shirt (needed to add color support to that which was simple) and a decent hairstyle for him. But… what if his shirt could animate? I took my shader for clothing, which uses an ID texture for color regions, and rewrote a copy of it using a noise function to get some animated oil slide patterns! One down!
Bastionette was easy enough, with some Knight Armor pieces for her costume, and the body slider system I’d put in place allowing me to make her suitably stocky. An existing energy shield fit perfectly.
Boltzmann Colony 9 was trickier. I needed to shrink his head down as much as possible with the body sliders, and then add a mesh with an animated pulsing brain texture to cover it. Making the brain shape was easy enough using three torus shapes at perpendicular axes. And searching for “Brain” in my asset folder turned up a “brain coral” material, which I copied and tinted, and then added some texture scrolling and vertex-offset pulsing. I had to set this up as a piece of Equipment, since my costume system didn’t support static mesh accessories, but it worked. I also need a big “9” logo, which lead me on a little detour of making 26 Number and 10 Letter options for logos in Gimp and adding them. I learned a few tricks in Gimp doing that.
Teddy Megaton gave me most pause. PO-Art had a Chibi set which I’d been eyeing up for a while, so I grabbed that, and had little trouble setting this up as a new body type. It all worked surprisingly well, but did produce a giant 8 foot tall Chibi robot as default! I scaled him down as much as I could, and gave him a permanent level of shrinking as a power. He was now the right size, and looked like a little brown robot. Now I needed a couple of meshes to add on, an army helmet and at the least a teddy bear noise, maybe button eyes too. I found a suitable army helmet on the Fab store for free. I made a Teddy face out of three sphere for the nose and eyes, and set these up as equipment and got them sitting right on him, and the helmet on all other body types too!
Finally, I did a bit of coding to allow me to make static mesh accessories for everyone, because the equipment solution was all wrong.
I figured this out, and celebrated by making a mortarboard hat for Ms. Mind, telepathic schoolteacher, just to go even further off-task!
None of this has advanced my schedule. I still haven’t finished the cutscene I set out to make, but I do have some new tech and toys to play with!
gamesfromthelifestar 