hey ho! my very first post!, luckily WordPress looks the same everywhere =)
Oookay, what to say.. today is a week and a day since i’m here. Got to know all all the Peach team, I even assisted to the Premiere! (pretty awesome btw), but they are almost all gone now, Sacha and Williams are still here in nl, yesterday Nathan went back home (told me to give 1 hug per person a day!, i’m on it). So that’s it, all the institute for us, is Apricot Time!.
Here follows some explanation of how we’re working on the game logic.
The idea is to give an initial picture to the uninitiated, so that you’ll get the basic jargon we use, while also talking about some apricot specific stuff more towards the end of the post.
We picked VenomGFX from Airport. On this picture Dariusz, Chris and Pablo waiting for him (together with Margreet making picture) near Gate 1 carrying original Blender(R) labeled sign made by Ton.
According to Murphy’s law – he arrived from Gate 2 and surprised us from back 🙂
Then we went to Blender Institute with pizza, beer, watching anime movie, and we had cool party.
Here’s a peek at the base terrain for the Apricot world. As it stands now, the dimensions are around 3km by 3km. Platform objects like slabs of rock and other terrain features are being created separately. Feedback is welcome but will be totally ignored, because I’m an artist and can’t handle criticism. No, if anyone has any ideas, of course we’d love to hear them, especially at this stage and especially about terrain. Although more comments about apricot rocket launcher cheat codes will still be considered.
To create the terrain, I started by painting a pretty simple black and white height map in Gimp and then applied it to a subdivided plane through the displacement modifier in Blender. After modifying the height map a bit to produce a result that was good enough to work with, I applied the filter and then used sculpting for then on. It had taken a few attempts to figure out an efficient technique to create a massive chunk of terrain while still having a decent amount of control over the proportions, which was extremely important and difficult in this case considering the main character(Frankie) is only like half of a meter long.
This week we’ll be working on texturing this with splatting and getting it all into Crystal Space. Also below is some concept art.
Ever have one of those weeks ?
Yes. Thats true… It’s real shame to say this but someone broke into our network… I still can’t believe… but slow down… let me explain everything….
1) I’m sure that someone other than me was accessing my email account. It was highly secured by my outlook, so I have no idea how it was possible…
2) Still I couldn’t believe it, but finally they send an email to us with proof:
venomgfx | 
04 17th, 2008 