| Issue 127 | January 27th 2012 | Contact the Editor | How to Contribute |
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LiveCode RPG Editors note: This appeared first in the Game Academy forum as a post/thread, and I immediately thought the wider community would love to hear about it. Elizabeth was kind enough to agree that we could publish it as an article - thanks very much! The sidescroller example (Galactic Gauntlet) in the webinars and sample stacks is ok, but I am a lot more interested in making an RPG with a figure that walks around and can meet people, rather than just dodging and shooting. So I thought I'd start a work on this, post my experiences, and see if others are interested. It's possible that a sort of "RPG toolkit" may come out of this.
The Design ProcessSketching In Week 4, we had a lesson about game design that covered some good points, highly relevant to this type of game as much as the sidescroller action game in the tutorials. The image in the first post is only the most general of sketches. Here's a slightly more detailed set of notes about the structure of the game, adapted from some handwritten notes I made a few weeks ago.
I'm no good at drawing, but I don't need to be for this, as I have a 3D modeling and rendering program and years worth of collected assets. I use Daz Studio. This allows me to load "rigged" figures that I can pose, clothing, props, etc. For this anime/manga themed project, I decided to use the figure Aiko 4. I'll also have some male characters, so I'll use Hiro 4 for those. (Note: I got these figures when they were free. They are still reasonably priced if one joins the "Platinum Club" at Daz3D.) My events take place in the context of a fictional high school in Japan, so I'll need school uniforms. I happen to like this one for female figures. There are no good male school uniforms on the market for Hiro 4, as far as I know, but this Nehru-style suit can substitute pretty well, if I recolor it. I want a basic school hallway for the start of the action, though I'll be including many other types of locations. I have initially started with this set, which I already had. Note that I could have used the clothes in this set as a school uniform if I'd wanted to keep my project more limited. (I did use the shoes and socks, actually.) Also, I need to remove the lockers from the hallway, as Japanese schools don't have those (there are smaller shoe lockers near the entrance doors). There are many hair models I could use, but I decided on an older model I have that had a classic "high ponytail" for the first figure. I'll be rendering images in layers and compositing them in LiveCode, so I can let the player customize their character somewhat. (More on that in a future post.) There are two more critical points to consider when rendering anime/manga images (or any cartoon images) from 3D models. The first is skin and eye textures. Aiko 4 and Hiro 4 ship with semi-photorealistic skin and eye textures, for reasons I can't fathom. I think they look really creepy. Fortunately, this is one of the aspects of 3D models that is very easy to change. I used this texture set. I also replaced clothing texture images with flat colors, and switched the fine "realistic" transparency maps for hair with large jagged patterns. I tweaked some of the background set textures as well (e.g. the lockers). The second critical point is the render style. Many programs like Daz Studio seem to emphasize photorealism, but I don't need or want that look for this project. I wanted "cell" style shading and fixed-width lines for this project. Again, 3D software makes it easy to change the render style. I used this add-on product. By using flat colors for my surfaces and adding the "toon" style render method, I was able to generate a wide variety of custom images for my game that look consistent in style. I would not have been able to do this easily if using stock images. Here's my female character:
In a future article, I'll cover how I generated animated frames and angles, as well as how I arranged to layer clothes, hair, etc.
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