Creating Myran

Myran is the name of the world our fire and ice mages live on. It's been quite an adventure translating our narrative designer, Matt's, stories and lore into artwork.

I posted my progress on the map of Myran I did last week. The map is nearly done, but now comes the tedious work. With the help of Erin, and uniSWF, each name of a place on the map will become a button that (when hovered over) will give a little description of the area.

Current progress. May need some more little details, but it is mostly finished.

You may be surprised to learn that this takes a buttload of time. For every name on the map, I have to bring it into Flash to create two states for every button (one for when it is not being hovered over, and one for when it is being hovered over) and save them out. Then we have to make sure the names are back in the correct spaces on the map so it looks good. The Flash work itself takes a couple hours. Reconfiguring the map through programming might be a little difficult.

Anyways, unfortunately, we ran into some issues with uniSWF. The in-game GUI was glitchy and would disappear if the screen was minimized. For now, we had to take it out of our build until the programmers figure out and fix what's wrong. So I'm actually creating buttons for a system that we're not 100% sure is going to work yet. Cross your fingers!

Other than that, I grabbed some models from Sibyl that she had finished and painted them so they were all set to go into Unity. 

Ooo rocks.

These are a couple of "rock piles" that are going to be reused throughout the ice level. Having these assets will help the level designers and artists work together to break up the space and define it better.

We also got some of the whiteboxed buildings and other elements into the engine. 

These images are from last week.

Believe me, when you're running around in the environment, it feels a lot different than it did when it was just boxes... Especially with the proper lighting. 

With lighting. (Also from last week.)

In other news, Spring Break is coming up! Most of us aren't going to get much of a break though. I plan on finishing the majority of the menu stuff so when I get back, I can focus on textures.

... And now that I think about it, it's not really going to be spring either. Hmmm.