2013-03-26, 09:35 PM
Dear Esther is just a nice example of one type of game design (realism), but there are many different approaches to game style each with their own appeal. What interested me mostly about Dear Esther is that it achieves a good "feeling" of realism while actually being mostly low-poly, low-resource.
I wouldn't say that I'm just endorsing adding "flaws" to models; it's also about choosing to design things so that they don't end up with lots of straight lines. For instance, in the bridge screenshot earlier, I don't think it would look as nice if they had chosen to design a perfectly flat "box" bridge. Because polygons are artificially flat by nature, anything you can do to can do to mask that, without over-using resources, makes things look better.
If your talking about SoM map Pieces specifically, I'd say you should always make 2 to 4 slightly different versions of each Piece in order to "break" artificial, repetitive straightness. It also helps to make irregular shaped Pieces slightly oversized so the different versions can overlap in a variety of ways at the seams. If you're making a single outdoor building model, you can design it any way you like then chop it into ~2m chunks and make each chunk a unique map Piece. Collision shapes stay simple/flat of course.
I thought Ben did an excellent job at breaking up Map Piece repetition in his last Rathmor demo.
If were talking specifically about SoM,
I wouldn't say that I'm just endorsing adding "flaws" to models; it's also about choosing to design things so that they don't end up with lots of straight lines. For instance, in the bridge screenshot earlier, I don't think it would look as nice if they had chosen to design a perfectly flat "box" bridge. Because polygons are artificially flat by nature, anything you can do to can do to mask that, without over-using resources, makes things look better.
If your talking about SoM map Pieces specifically, I'd say you should always make 2 to 4 slightly different versions of each Piece in order to "break" artificial, repetitive straightness. It also helps to make irregular shaped Pieces slightly oversized so the different versions can overlap in a variety of ways at the seams. If you're making a single outdoor building model, you can design it any way you like then chop it into ~2m chunks and make each chunk a unique map Piece. Collision shapes stay simple/flat of course.
I thought Ben did an excellent job at breaking up Map Piece repetition in his last Rathmor demo.
If were talking specifically about SoM,