Dear fans,
It's been more than 2 and 1/2 years since I started with this project. From the very first environment design tries in technology I barely knew, through first serious software engineering, it's been a long jurney, and I'm pretty confident of an immodest statement that it all helped me to work my way into more-or-less seasoned developer, which inevitably changed the way I look at Project Van Buren.
What started as a dream with no end in sights, with no real plan, and most importantly, no actual knowledge of the processes needed to accomplish any part of that dream, has become much more clearer, sharper over time. I've changed my mind regarding vast majority of aspects of the game so many times I can hardly count it. The naive dream of what I would like to see Van Buren end up being has been continuously shaped into more concrete, realistic image as my skills progressed and my judgement advanced.
You've all seen the "nice" graphics I've been posting in 2019, you've all seen the mocap animations and fairly detailed character art. All that was the result of this insane and naive idea of creating a game that would match to triple AAA production. I kept believing in it until I started to be slapped by the "gamedev reality".
Not everything I desired turned out to be possible to make for various reasons, some aspects just turned out to be not working well with others, and abandoning/changing some ideas inevitably required revision of other ideas, workflows and practices. Since no one ever taught me these things, I naturally had to go through this process of creating, realizing, solving and (hopefully) preventing my own mistakes, which set me back in time several times over.
So - what exactly is my problem, you may ask. Well, it all started with the latest screenshot I've posted on Twitter. I started to notice some visual aspects of the game just didn't work together, namely extremely low-poly static geometry with much higher quality textures and materials just slapped over them. Once it caught my eye, I just couldn't unsee it anymore. With that, even greater doubt came to my mind - the more I worked on making things look "better" and more "modern", the more I was shifting from the original art style and tone/vibe that was meant for Van Buren. All that made me stop the work and start reconsidering some of my previous decisions. With that, another technical issue showed - I could already foresee that the fancy animation controller I've made and been so proud of will cause many troubles in the future, for it's based on motion captured animations that are not intended for an (pseudo)isometric game because they are not constrained to the grid - or to be more exact, it'd be virtually impossible to edit these animations to work with as dense grid as VB requires. Ok, it may not be impossible, but it would hurt the visual aspect of the animations so greatly (forced turns, stutters, keyframe jumps, etc) all the "niceness" of having mocap animations would be for nothing. The only solution I've been able to think of with my associate lead was to revert back to the original Van Buren animations forged from the tech demo - there is a full set of movements, they're all technically adjusted to the game's needs and most importantly - they are much easier to edit or even expand than mocap animations.
This decision, of course, yielded yet another concern - would it be ok to leave "nicer" graphics with 2003's animations? Leaving the concern about shifting from the original Van Buren vibe completely aside, the answer is, in my opinion, still no, no matter how I would like to rationalize and justify otherwise.
And thus, the decision has been made - we are reverting to the original Van Buren visuals and animations.
I took 2 weeks off and reprogrammed some of our tools to support other tile types we haven't been using before (namely the "ground", or "landscape" tiles). I used the gift of this modern age of ours - AI algorithms - to enhance the original textures to look better on modern resolutions, and I decided to create normal maps for them as well to add a bit of a "depth". Then my team mates joined me and helped me with conversion of even more tiles and props. I took our reprogrammed in-house level editor tool to build this small map (built according to actual placement screenshot of one of the submaps of Maxson Bunker location - check the design document) to better demonstrate the results (still WIP):
I understand this may leave some of you disappointed. But this is the only way I can continue working on this project, and it's the only way I have my full confidence in.
I truely hope this gets an release someday! A demo might be a nice idea
