The journey begins with one block.

So here we are at the ground floor. The absolute start of my newest project. I have come to the realization that it will be impossible for me alone to create a game like the enormous development studios produce every few years, so I have to be realistic. My main goal is to make very high quality art that can all fit together and be reusable. This will save me time in the future.  I do not want to sacrifice quality for quantity.

Enter Codename Dungeon!

Yes, I know it's not very original, but it's just a codename. I'll come up with something much better in the future.

And dun da da dun! Here's the fist art! It's a block... running in Unreal 4... With no color no less.

Codename Dungeon's First Block

Everything has to start somewhere, right? And this, to me, was actually really exciting.

When I started to come up with ideas for games that I could make, I thought back to those old corridor RPGs like Bard's Tale and Wizardry, you know, the ones with those dark dungeons that stretched deep down. Well, many of those dungeons were made with block/brick walls. So, using the knowledge of 3D Art that I have accumulated over the years, I immediately started to model a high polygon rock wall texture in Mudbox. But the results were unsatisfying.  As good as parallax and bump mapping is, things start to fall apart when a wall is to the side of you. 

Hence the block. My idea, and I'm sure this is not original, is to model out all the blocks in a section of dungeon wall that I can repeat over and over. A high poly version will be baked onto a low poly version, as seen above.  Many games these days use a block wall texture and a few blocks sticking through it to add some depth. I'm going to make the entire wall from individual blocks. and it is going to be incredibly tedious.

So, I will see you next time when, hopefully, I have a full wall, and maybe some color this time.