The Road to the Trilogy - Asset Design

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got most of the work for the year done on the Compass books. The Compass books are being rolled into the Regency card game so expect them to be released as sample Regency cards soon. I don’t have any actual work to do here other than formatting them for use on cards. That’s done. Also everything I do for Regency is designed to be compatible with the final video game trilogy.

Regency will contain quest cards that I’m still working on for each world and each world in the video game will have the same quests and quest dialogue. They’ll repeat by randomly drawing a new one using a random generation table. When a quest is over you can talk to a named NPC and get the game to generate you another one. The quest dialogue will change based on which enemy type is involved in the quest and where in the world map they spawn. These are drawn separately from a second random generation table. All of this will be voiced by me.

It looks like I have just the card game and the video game trilogy to work on for the foreseeable future. They will build each other as I go. Next I need every asset I have planned to be made by me in the Unreal Engine. There’s an important point here I need to make. I don’t 3D model. I’m actually really not good at it. I am using specifically Unreal Engine 4 for this task despite the fact that it’s a few years out of date. 4 has a feature I need to make the assets without doing 3D modelling.

I need first and foremost the 3D items that represent food. I need a sack of potatoes, one of apples, a carton of blueberries, a sack of flour, a bag of rice and so on. These are used in the cooking system that you can use between ventures into the wilderness. I’ll document that more later on today. I can make these using a tool called Save Group. In the Unreal Engine you can take a set of objects in the environment while editing the environment and select them using the mouse. They can be grouped together so that you can move or copy and paste them as a group.

In 4 there is an option when you right click on one of these groups to save it as a single asset with a new name. I can use this to built the things I need out of smaller pieces, select all of them with the mouse, right click and save the group as a single asset in the content browser with a name of my choosing. I’m doing this to make pre-fabricated walls and furniture as well. The option is in Unreal Engine 4 but not later. This is fine. The pieces I’m using are the starter shapes and I’m making the materials, the engine’s word for textures, myself out of the starting materials.

I’ve done all of this before. It’s all an exact set of steps I know how to do down to where the menu options are and how to organize them in the content browser for easier access later. I need food props now and then it’s crafting goods and furniture. I’ll have more later about my plans for the cooking system. I want it to feel tactile and like you’re actually doing something hands on and not just selecting a recipe off a list and hearing a sound effect. I want it to be gameplay and not just inventory management.

C J Mcpherson