Apologies for the slight lateness of this post. This week (and unfortunately the next week as well) I am going to be away on the weekends, which makes it difficult to publish blog posts. Being away at the weekend also has the effect of drastically reducing development time - about half of the time I spend on development each week is at the weekend!
Therefore I was only able to work for about 6 hours on the game this week. No matter though as there are still things to show!
Props, props, props
In last week’s blog post I showed an early location in the game - a university lecture theatre. However, besides for the main layout and structures, it was really quite empty. So this week was spent creating lots of smaller props that can be used to pad out that emptiness and make the world feel a lot more lived in.
Unlike most of the large props in the lecture theatre such as the blackboard and whiteboard, a lot of these props can be reused in other locations. Therefore, over time, the amount of development work spent on creating smaller props has the potential to reduce as more and more props are made. There will likely always be location specific ones though!
Posters
One specific type of prop has potential for a lot of fun. Being a university, there are likely to be lots of posters around the place, including in the lecture theatre. They’re a nice place to include fun bits of art and vague references to things so at some point I might take some time to produce some cool looking posters.
At the minute I have created one poster using art I drew years ago and have now repurposed. I always liked the art, so it’s nice to finally use it somewhere!
Next Week
As I mentioned in the introduction, I am also going to have reduced work time in the following week. There are only a few more props that I want to make for the lecture theatre so I am aiming to get them all done. I also need to add other things to the location like collision and lights, then get the lecture theatre loading in-engine.
I plan to create another location straight after this one so I can test moving between locations in-engine. Once that is done I am going to spend a bunch of time on adding real-time shadows to the world.