As my time is a premium these days. I try as much as possible to do things with a dual purpose. The same with gaming, I try to limit my gaming to titles that have a core mechanic that’s similar to my game project.

Which brings me to Deedlit in the Wonder Labyrinth Record of Lodoss War. Gosh that’s a mouthful. Going forward I’m just going to say “Wonder Labyrinth”.

Wonder Labyrinth lands in the Metroidvania category. As I’m a big fan of Metroid and Castlevania I took to this like a Duck to water. I didn’t know too much about the game before I bought it. Art work looked cool on the box and I’ve heard of Lodoss War in the past. Pretty sure it was a Dreamcast game back in the day (best console in my opinion). Did a bit more research on Wonder Labyrinth and found a trailer. I was blown away by the pixel art and animation. It’s up there with Castlevania Symphony of the Night in my opinion.

So I ordered my copy from Amazon. Yeah I’m a physical copy purist, only with switch games now. Most disc based games (Play Station and Xbox) require a day one download to function. I “will” own my stuff and be very happy thank you. For those who know what I mean.

I must say it’s been a while since I played a game so obsessively as i did with Wonder Labyrinth. Right from the off I was hooked. Controls work great and responsive. Minor mark down was the inability to swap between weapons on the fly. You have to pause the game go through menus to do this. The quality of the experience really shines through. Although Wonder Labyrinth is a short game for the genre. Short games are not a bad thing. It’s better to have a short but high quality experience, than a long drawn out low quality game. Assassin Creed comes to mind. The recent games are like an unpaid second job.

If you have the money and time, I fully recommend Wonder Labyrinth for all you Metroidvania fans out there.

My love of gaming and a dream to make my own all started 30+ years ago. When my siblings and I got a Sega Mega Drive with Sonic 2 for Christmas. I can still feel the shock and excitement as I think about it now. We didn’t see that coming, a day to remember.

Trying harder in school finally made sense. I simply wanted to make something amazing like Sonic 2. I paid more attention in art classes, started drawing more. Cherished my one class of I.T. each week. All in pursuit of making games one day. I studied each game I got as much as I enjoyed playing. Many of the games I still own and play till this day.

At University I decided not to study a course in game design. I couldn’t see how this would work for me. It felt right to continue down the artist path. So, I decided to study animation. It was pretty tough going. I didn’t have a computer at home for much of my life compared to my classmates, so I was learning to use a PC while getting to grips with Maya and Photoshop. The challenge was worth it.

I got through my studies and entered the workplace. Quickly found out I was unprepared for the games industry. I needed to do even more work to get that job. You’d think that was part of the course but no. Till this day there’s a disconnect between education and workforce requirements in games, VFX, commercial / advertising 3D industries. That’s for another discussion.

I managed to break into the games industry on 2 occasions. Once in Canada and second most recently in Czech Republic. As a 3D artist first time and a 3D Animator. I was excited on both occasions, and I enjoyed my time at both companies. It did not match what I thought working in games would be. Main problem was my taste in game design. The game styles I love don’t get made anymore, not at big or medium sized game companies. They do still happen often, but only in the Indie game dev scene. Not a big chance of working at small companies like that. Budgets are tight so they don’t hire many people. If I want to work on the type of games that speak to me, I’d have to make my own. So, I started down this path 3 years ago in my spare time and between jobs.

I have enough assets created to start on a vertical slice of gameplay over the next 12 months. I don’t know if my game will find an audience but I’m going to enjoy the journey wherever it leads.

When I first started my game it quickly became known I’m going to need a lot of props for my project. What made this harder was the type of setting I chose, sci fi. My game isn’t set far off in the future. 20 - 30 years really so I could base things on modern designs I see today with a twist. This was around the time I had to get over my thoughts about using asset packs. It’s not cheating it’s smart. I can’t do every ounce of my game by myself. A friend mentioned about a site called kitbash.com. So I had a browse and to my fortune they had the secret lab pack that had most of what i needed. I also saw how many big studios use their asset packs for big production. Made me feel like an idiotic snob for not using asset libraries to my advantage sooner.

They sell complete asset packs based around a theme. Secret Lab were the type of assets I needed. It wasn’t all great. I had to go in and do a lot of poly count reduction on every useful asset. UV unwrap was'n’t right for my needs so that needed to be done. As my game isn’t photo realistic all textures where custom made in Substance Painter. Although I didn’t model all these assets from scratch I had a big part to play in getting it all ready for Godot Engine. So I still had a big say in the result for my own ego. I estimate that this asset pack alone saved me about 6-9 months of work. In the end it took me 2 months of solid work to get the assets i chose all prepped for my game.

Great tool for many artist to use in their projects. You can find them at www.kitbash.com

I use Marmoset Tool Bag 3 quite extensively to make reference videos of all the assets I create. I do not have much free time to draw concept art for each individual prop. I’d prefer to take this a proach but I’m a studio of one for now, work smarter and all that. Marmoset Tool Bag lets me keep track of everything. I keep a directory of reference videos for each prop that I make. I can visually compare everything together to keep thing consistent. As of today I’ve made 230 unique props for my game with much more to go.

Marmoset Tool Bag is a real time render engine like Godot or Unity without the game making parts. I set up scenes like I would in a game engine to see if my textures are in the right place.

It got me thinking recently why not drop some of the scene assets together along with some quick character animation. See if it all looks cohesive or not. I have not done this before so it could fall apart. Luckily, two years of prop modelling and texturing was not a waste. It all works well so far. Have a look below.

Main character named Garrett Del Vari in his second outfit.

I’m getting close to building out my game prototype. There’s this little issue of rigging. Not my most enjoyable step as an animator but it has to be done well. It gives more headaches later if you rush it. As of right now there’s four enemy types not including bosses. Three humanoid and one flying mech. The flying mech (a quadcopter drone) was pretty easy to sort out and ready to animate. This one isn’t so necessary for the prototype, so I’ll sit on that for now, the others are more import. I’m currently at a stage where the humanoid characters have a bone rig, and the skin weights are finalised. I just need to figure out the control rig so I can begin animation.

Jury is still out on the animation style. Full hand keyed animation or edited motion capture. Hand keyed is always cool but with a lot of characters to animate it might not be the most effect use of time. If I go down the path of motion capture, I have to capacity to do cut scenes. This could be cool addition, but we’ll see.

The test animations below are a little old as the model has been updated recently. Animation is from mixamo.com free motion capture library from Adobe.

I’m definitely in the minority on this one. To be fair I started using Mud Box years ago, before the Autodesk acquisition. I prefer to use the tool that comes naturally to me. Why fight with a piece of software that just goes against what seems natural to you. I prefer to make progress and enjoy the creative process. I’m not going to get on here and fan boy about Mud Box being better than Zbrush or Blender Sculpting because it’s not. Both Zbrush and Blender get regular updates. Mud Box is clearly the unloved child. Autodesk can’t be bothered with it. They’re one step away from walking out on their adopted child.

So why do I keep using it. For now it gets the job done and I still like using it. I can quickly get my ideas done with Mud Box. Plus Autodesk haven’t killed it yet. I’ve got eight months left on my current subscription, when its up I’ll make the switch probably to Blender you can’t beat free. There’s some truly amazing artist that still use Mud Box to a level far beyond me. I doubt their employer / client cares when they see the end result.

All that matters for me is to enjoy the creative process. How you come to the result doesn’t matter to the person who receives it. Choose the right tools for you and enjoy the process.