So I took another nearly 2 week break. After crunching to add a lot to LEWD, I couldn't keep focusing on it. It's hard to just work on one thing. When it gets funded, I can, of course. But right now it's hard.
http://www.playlewd.com/game2/For a while, since the beginning of making LEWD, I had the idea that I wanted to have an actual 3D MMORPG, probably running in the browser. The MMO server I'm making for LEWD is something I can use for it, simply with the 3D client connected and things like RPG combat support added on top of it.
With all that time passed since then, when I had hoped to already have LEWD "shipped", I still had that original idea in my mind, and how I wanted it to look. It's nagged on me enough that I wanted to get something written and to see if the sort of look I was planning for would work.
I like some of those older games that have sprites on top of 3D backgrounds, like Ragnarok Online and Wolfenstein 3D. But there's lots of advantages to 3D such as true shadows, dynamic lighting (you can light/shadow sprites, but it's all on a flat terrain. They don't have true vectors), and so on. I could even have things like ice spell effects, where it's rendered to be sprite looking like that but reflects the 3d world off its surface.
So I wanted to have 3d objects be rendered to look like sprites, which is really complicated. It's so complicated that it hasn't been done in a way that mimics how sprites look, so I wasn't even sure it'd be possible unless I tried.
There's some bugs with it, like I need to write better fog that looks nicer and goes over the outlines, and there are some bugs with the outlines having some narrow black lines on one side, but it's mostly what I hoped.
There's still more I can do as well, like making it so the object only appears to have 8 or 16 sides to it. Like in all those old games, the sprites were rendered to have a limited number of sides to them. Usually a looking up, down, left, right, and the diagonals between. I could snap the model to those rads when rotating around to get the same effect, which I think would look cool. I could also have animations playing at a lower framerate, which is typical of sprites.
Anyways, I'll be working on LEWD more starting tomorrow, and I'll work on writing the new Kickstarter page.
Comments
is the model yours?
I like it. It leaves more to the imagination. http://chan.sankakucomplex.com/post/show/38508 http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=560420
With most hentai/porn games, they almost always look messed up. Uncanny valley, lots of clipping, and so on.
There's someone out there that does pretty high quality sprite hentai games that look really nice. I forget his name. They look nice, compared to those 3d games.
When zoomed out they look normal. It's just up close they're all sprite looking, obscured. It'll help make things look nice while still lower cost.
for me warcraft is the perfect use of 3D, very clever incredibly low poly with high detailed textures
talking about sprite images i should recommend to pay a visit to marionette-h-gameworks.com
i love his style, and he's developing a game too
cheers
And yeah, Minecraft is simply low resolution textures without any blending. And the weapons are just a texture on a flat plane. It's not nearly the same. That's a really simple thing to do.
Here I have detailed 3d, but I'm trying to make it look like flat 2d art just as a style choice. Interestingly, it could be used to render 3d models as sprites for traditional 2d CG, too.
Anyway, Hanyo gave me another model so I decided to work on it a little more. I don't think I'm going to be able to put any actual fucking in it, though, since I don't have the assets.
it's awesome what some people can make with that tiny amount of pixels
i can't wait to see the new model
It's just a more chibi model. It's not really something fit for making into sprites.
I just changed the model, and changed fog to deferred rendering, and updated the sprite-i-fication shader so it gets less pixelated with distance, like how zooming in/out on sprites would.
There's a lot of other things I want to do, but they'll take too long.
At least now I know it's possible to do what I wanted. It's just a matter of the time to finish it all up.