I learned Blender all the way back in June. I finished the donut tutorial over the course of a week, and I played around with it for a few hours after that. But I hadn’t touched it since then. Before I began I told myself that I should be careful not to get too ahead of myself, because it might not even stick. Well after opening Blender again today, it is safe to say 90% of what I learned did not stick.
But I did relearn most of the basics quickly, the learning curve wasn’t as steep and the interface wasn’t overwhelming. I found a nice tutorial from Unreal that showed a workflow to manipulate the mannequin they have so you can create your own animations. I’m hoping that with this I can move towards creating the first prototype of my main character. I’m confident that by next week I will have a character model that I can show off, with the hat, half-cape, and lantern. It will definitely be very rough, but I’m excited to start modeling and doing something beyond the tutorials. It’s almost time to get my hands dirty again.
The progress today wasn’t as much as I would have wanted, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. You can see above that I made a custom pose. So I learned how to create it in Blender then import it into Unreal. So I have to add Blender to the list of programs I have to become adequate in. Modelling and animation is way more complicated than making donuts. To make a smooth animation I have to grab each part and manipulate it into the right post and save the frame, essentially taking a picture. Then do it again for the next pose and so on. Basically it’s stop motion. I’ll create more custom animations once I’ve got a custom model working.
And I learned how to import objects from blender as well. I forgot to scale it down so it’s pretty big as seen above. Don’t ask what that thing is, I just randomly stretched out a block trying to remember all the hotkeys in Blender. Anyway all of this will come into play when I handcraft the lantern then put it in-game. There will probably be a lot of other custom objects I’ll need to create in the future. Down the line I’ll be creating enemies/bosses that will be more complicated than the player itself. The hardest part of that will be programming the AI, but I won’t stress about that just yet.
Things have become more colorful and alive after each hour of lectures I watch on YouTube. I don’t think I’ve ever studied harder than I have in these past 4 months (sorry college degree.) Also, I got a great glimpse of the sunset while watching the lecture.
Next week I promise this lil’ guy will be 3D.
Fantasy Knight v2
I’ve also made some updates to Fantasy Knight, you can head v2 here. You can grab the zip file for your OS, and unzip it. For the MAC version it should run straight from the .app file, right now it doesn’t seem to be running for everyone so hopefully it works in most cases. For the windows file, unzip then it should run from the .exe file.
Updates:
- You can only attack in one direction now. So it’s harder to clear enemies.
- Restarting doesn’t restart the application, it restarts within the game.
- More tiles/background, I basically added more random colors for the world.
- Included a 3rd track of music. There is random music whenever you enter Play. I had made 3 tracks but I forgot to include the 3rd in the initial release so it should be there now.
- Camera movement is way smoother. It doesn’t jitter anymore when the camera adjusts.
- Only the player flashes when he is hit by an enemy, and the timer for invulnerability (when you’re flashing) counts down only when you take actions.
Overall it should be more difficult in this version. I probably will update it every now and then when I feel like it because it’s fun to add and refine such a small game.
GoldenGratus Games 