Nathaniel3W
Rockwell Studios
So I'm working on the day/night cycle on the world map in Himeko Sutori.
(Placeholders, WIP, first attempt, etc., etc.)
The shaders there are all based on this...
...but with the highlights toned down a bit. I should probably try turning those back up. My world looks a little flat, no pun intended, and maybe brighter highlights would improve it.
I would love for my game to look like this:
But I realize I'm comparing my solo-developer, near-zero-budget game to a multimillion-dollar project built by a team of over 100. There were reasons why I decided to go with a retro look, cost and feasibility among them.
I started trying to include more detailed models in my world map, like these mountains, which I think look pretty good.
But that's the problem. They look pretty good, and nothing else does. Also, I had to put decals on them to make them blend into the surrounding terrain. (You can see that I needed to fix the decal sorting there... The hex grid should have gone over the grass blend.) Anyway, I tried putting some cool models in there, but I don't think that's going to work out for me right now. I'm going to just build all of the terrain features with the in-engine landscape tool. And if higher quality terrain models aren't going to be an option I'm going to have to figure out something else to make the world map less boring.
Maybe I'll start off with some more terrain texture variation? Water features maybe? Any advice?
(Placeholders, WIP, first attempt, etc., etc.)
The shaders there are all based on this...
...but with the highlights toned down a bit. I should probably try turning those back up. My world looks a little flat, no pun intended, and maybe brighter highlights would improve it.
I would love for my game to look like this:
But I realize I'm comparing my solo-developer, near-zero-budget game to a multimillion-dollar project built by a team of over 100. There were reasons why I decided to go with a retro look, cost and feasibility among them.
I started trying to include more detailed models in my world map, like these mountains, which I think look pretty good.
But that's the problem. They look pretty good, and nothing else does. Also, I had to put decals on them to make them blend into the surrounding terrain. (You can see that I needed to fix the decal sorting there... The hex grid should have gone over the grass blend.) Anyway, I tried putting some cool models in there, but I don't think that's going to work out for me right now. I'm going to just build all of the terrain features with the in-engine landscape tool. And if higher quality terrain models aren't going to be an option I'm going to have to figure out something else to make the world map less boring.
Maybe I'll start off with some more terrain texture variation? Water features maybe? Any advice?