You are an artist 
I can’t wait for see the game in movement
Well what’s new? I’ve been scaling up everything to real world sizes. Goodbye placeholder scales and proportions. Almost there. Several nights walking around the scenes where things are starting to feel lifesize. Perhaps even larger than life.
Lodge B1 is finally in true 3D form and isn’t a 2D concept anymore. So at moment every area of the project has a good start. The only area/level that is at 0% progress would be the final stage AIRSTRIP. Depending on what we can get away with in levels 3 and 4 will explain what we can do in the airstrip level.
Hey there. I’m back with more wip pics.
Comparisons to the progress back in August and recent.
test render. exterior of the hotel.
New idea is this front facing stair room.
New window frame. Made from the same siding panel on the left there.
And also in other news. The hotel graveyard discard pile 
This valley scene hit 5000+ cube primitives recently. It hold most of the game. Not everything. Separate interior only scenes have a good million plus going.
Though here is the true valley data at moment. After things get combined, deleted, renamed, moved and so on.
I’ve done a bunch of work to get it down to 1.3 million verts, was upwards to 4-5 million before cleaning up. And to no cost to the visuals after the downgrade in triangles. The game world has never looked this good.
Hey blenderartists. Been keeping real busy since my last update.
- Lots of progress on the hotel design and routes.
- My new pet project are the basements.
- Cameras for levels 1-4 are nearly finalized, or at least way better than before. Hadn’t touched cameras at all since Feb. 2013 (Thread-Post #74). With these new positions I have a much clearer idea on what needs more detail. The light at the end of the tunnel is becoming larger. I’ll have an exact number on prerendered backgrounds soon. It’ll be much lower than my original guesses of ~1000.
The new goal or deadline is August 2015. Not a project completion goal but a goal non the less. Aiming to be 80% done with the prerendered artwork. Heyy wait a minute… that’s same goal as last August!
I’ve been using my CPU to for viewport and final renders lately (AMD FX 6300 six core) which handle things a bit slower but I haven’t crashed anything while using it. I quit using my GPU for rendering since it is so easy to kernal error when exceeding the vram. The error shuts blender off completely and stung me too many times to count. So the CPU rendering for now is helping my sanity.
In other news this thread is now on the first page of work in progress when searched by view count, and not a single minute of gameplay shared so far! Work. In. Progress. Yay, thanks for reading and much more to come. The program is coming along, still hush-hush on that for now.
Probably something else I’m forgetting. Anyway talk to you all soon.
Here are a bunch of placeholders and oddities. Noisey renders below. Been a couple of months since my last post so get that scroll wheel ready again
*gun models below are from blendswap. Still need to add them to credits as I’m not sure if they will be used in final game.
updated this shack for goodness sakes
updated the roof tiles
subject to change
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So here I revived or combined a old scrap level. Basically just the trail shape
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Very old version here
Well it’s August already, did we meet the deadline? No. Are we still working hard? Yes.
Lately I’ve switched my focus from basement level design back to hotel. Progress is slow but I can always look back a few months and see solid progress.
We found a stable animator. Actually he’s one of admins of the blender facebook groups! Looking forward to see what he brings. The animations is one bottleneck I’ve been ignoring for a little long. We have animations in the game but they are all placeholder and nothing to be showing off. In other news the lead programmer is moving Countries soon. Not sure if that’ll mean more or less time towards the project but we will see about that. I’ll be staying busy on my end this month gearing up towards the release of Metal Gear Solid 5.
Some features of the game that are in some state of ready-ness:
puzzle logics, doors and level streaming, several versions of inventory and that logic, reloading guns (it’s a bit different for IOU), basic shooting and damage, some a.i. pathfinding, gore details have been researched and started and of course the fancy stuff involved to make prerendered scenes in Unity.
One major change recently is what I did to the hotel. It got bigger. Each floor got something new and many things were shuffled around,
See here’s how it looked before the expansion:
And after:
Front
Side,
Work on the new entrance hall
texture mixing
Some hotel bedroom ideas.
Sauna room.
with-noise
with-out
Hello. Hello. We’re still working on this and hoo boy it’s time for a update,
Noticing some blenders users are scared to render noisy things. Or saying interior rendering in cycles plane isn’t possible. It’s very possible and art is art. So I got thinking, been a while since I shared noisy renders in my IOU game topic.
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Enough on that. What’s going on with IOU since the last update. Most of my time in 2015 was spent working on the hotel and the basement sections of the game, two huge areas that were not part of the original design.
In the middle of August we restarted. Everything. Well, everything except for the artwork/levels/story, that of which I continue to toil away with and complete as we move towards phase 2. All the progress we made in the Unity engine has been put aside. We still have it of course but we won’t be using it.
Now we’re after making our own engine. This engine will be the new missing link with blender and this project.
We plan on making at least two chapters for IOU. A forest and city. The forest is what will be available first.
So you must be thinking… oh alright, this game is still YEARS off. Well maybe. But we have made progress on our own engine since Aug2015. It’s moving. I’ll keep blenderartists posted on the updates.
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May I introduce you to Emma. Work in Progress.
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recent renderings:
Blendswap BGE gun. I added a cycles material to it. And tested out baking with it. Very nice results 4K image with 10 samples.
2012 room:
Current:
Vertex painting with textures. Really nice results.
Always nice to see this still moving along
Tip o’ the hat.
Re-opened to allow OP to update.
Thanks Richard and thanks for reading everyone. Lack of updates here lately but we stayed busy during 2016. When starting the project out this blenderartists thread helped me get going and I found lots of help and teammates here. After that spark I retreated to a small facebook group to further tinker. I love every month of it. So far in 2017 I’ve focused again on the Hotel location. Not much of the old hotel version is making the transition and that’s a good thing I think. Striving to get rid of that dollhouse miniature look 3d renders can have.
The plan is to attempt to be nearly finished with all the background artwork by the end of the year. When starting the project out in 2012 (just beginning to learn blender as well) I thought to myself well sure if I can make a room a day this isn’t that much work and I was right… kinda. It’s a lot of work but when it comes down to make a new room that progress can quickly happen within a day or so. Then comes the stew meat, it takes a long time to cook.
Game engine wise we’re still making it and more on that later this year. Can’t wait to show something. Starting this project out I wanted to make a PS1 or Sega Saturn style game and that is still the goal.
What else on my mind this instant?
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Umm. Wow, Substance Painter 2, not sure what I would do without this in my pipeline. It’s so useful and calming to take 10-20 minutes and paint something and head back into blender. Far less adjusting the nodes now, just plug and play. I’ve finally created a starting node set which speeds up my preparation intermissions between painter and blender. That’s keeping my spirits up lately and able to pull some seriously long days now.
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Blender Cycles keeps getting better and better. Amazing. If you’ve stuck around this topic you’ve probably noticed I was not afraid to post noisy renders, I enjoyed the noise but I can also confirm the new renders for IOU are nearly 100% noiseless now. I’ve seen the light and it is called Pascal GPU.
My last post was such a long time ago I’m not sure what placeholders I should share,
I’ll refrain from dipping into the 2016 renders for now. All these are recent, some from a few days ago.
Welcome back, and happy blending
Wow those assets and environments are great! Little pieces of art by themselves. Are you a team working on this game? If so, how do you organize?
Thanks. I do view the art and levels as the same thing. Two man team for the most part, I’m doing the levels and artwork. We’ve hired extra help for animations and voice work, cutscenes are a far-off goal though, likely to release the game without cutscenes at first. I think what Overwatch does with post-release cutscenes is pretty original, release cutscenes free to the internet whenever it feels necessary.
Originally posted by FoundationsofPause
We are lucky to live in this day of free blenders fully capable.
True i agree to you words bro !!!
Fred/K.S
Chopped this up tonight.
This videogame looks really good.I wish more bge videogames looked like this.
We tried quite few engines before settling on making our own in late 2015, 2012-2013 this project was BGE.
Blender is still central to the engine and scene-editing though.
edit: Donations have been closed.
I’m going to give the hotel another month or so then comes another exciting switch for me creative-wise. The basements! I have yet to tackle the basements with substance painter at the texturing helm. So things should get messy down there.
iou game engine news,
- Fixed camera. Basic character movement. XB360 controller support (with rumble)
Working or in the works, - simple gouard shading (diffuse, per vertex lighting)
- flat shading (per face lighting)
- blob shadows
- perspective correct texture mapping (we might want to turn it off if we see it no PSXy enough)
- support for Z sorting (PSX) and Z-buffering (more accurate)
- object culling
- backface culling
- 320x240 and 640x480 in game buffers.
- higher res buffer (depending on screen height) for font render/UI/debug interfaces
- keyboard/controller input
- flexible/moddable resource loading system and asset format
- cool particle systems (BLOOD) (we’ll get to that later)
- physics (maybe? gives us cool things to play with zombies)
- shape-based collision detection (spheres, capsule and boxes)
- arbitrary number of cameras from blender
- skeletal animation (support for weights so we can do look at etc)
- custom animation/level file format/exporter in blender
- hot reloading (editing code and reloading game instantly)
- looped live code editing, for when we’re testing, record playback for later visit/analysis
- simple zombie follow AI
- alpha blending/transparency
- reflection/mirrors
Loose schedule I’ve been trying to stick to this year. It has morphed a little since Jan.
Once the basements are matching the hotel quality there will be more than enough to bring this world to life during testing.
April. - Hotel May. - Basement Labs
June. - Basement Labs
July. - Basement Labs
Aug. - Nature. Airstrip.
Sept. - Nature. Airstrip.
Oct. - Lodge Interiors. Nature again. Lodge exteriors.
Nov. - ??
Dec. - ??
Recent renderings.
Tape Monster. Boo.
New front desk modeled and textured yesterday
A locked door…
The pool deck
Ranger station 2F
Private gas chamber
Ball room ceiling idea
Hotel upper floors
Thanks for reading.
I see a lot of cycles renders. But i dont understand, how would these fit into the game?
You can bake stuff in cycles and import in engines, you can also use prerendered scenes and have invisible physics objects the player walks around on, and you can even use a depth mask, so that items in the background occlude the player