MagicSeek

[miatthas]

(courtyard)


(Entrance Hall)


(Dungeon)


This is MagicSeek Castle. These are screen shots of a future RPG game

[Max Power]

It's very simple, and heavily repeating in tiles. Is this all BSP?

Seems like a lot of strange shapes and choices. Are you drawing from any inspiration or just winging it? Seems you could use some reference images to help you through this process. I mean, those steps are just cut off in the middle of the staircase.

[Dip2010]

i agree with max power. it looks too plain. theres so much open space and not much random clutter you always see. it looks 'boxy' with all the sharp edges. adding a few static meshes here and there can help alot.

[ambershee]

Also, pay attention to your materials and lighting - even with simple brush based geometry, it will make a significant difference to the appearance of your game.

At the moment, it looks like you are not using any kind of appropriate lighting, and are only using diffuse textures. Taking time to manually light your scene, and setting up materials with normal maps will greatly improve the appearance of the scene.

[miatthas]

Yes, I defiantly agree that it's plain. I'm not really that great a modeling, so for the most part I just BSP--for now. I'm looking to change that, because who wants to play a game that looks like it's made by UE1. However, I have attempted to make some static meshes. The towers in the courtyard are static meshes; there are a couple doors here and there (not shown) that are static meshes; the roof of the dungeon is a mesh; the windows in the dungeon are meshes, but I didn't make them.

I actually don't know what you mean by "appropriate lighting." Do you mean there's not enough difference between the light areas and dark areas? And believe it or not, the some some of these textures are actually from the UDK default packages.

About textures. Even though it may look like I'm just using defuse, I'm actually using more than that. Almost every material uses Specular. The walls inside use Emissive. The walls inside, floor inside, the stairs, and the dungeon walls walls all use a normal map. Look at the floor--see the tiles? The original textures didn't have the tiles thing. But yeah, my material knowledge isn't that great.

Probably one of the main reasons that I'm so big on BSP, is that I really like playing an Unreal Engine 1 game--Harry Potter II. That game is also my my inspiration for the entrance hall. I'll look into the lighting, materials, and meshes though. I agree this game is really more of UE1 game. Thanks.


(that's the dungeon wall up close. I use a linear interpolate to blend two textures. Then I plug one into specular. I have a moss normal texture I found that I plugged into normal.

Edit: oh, and the paintings are actually just one static mesh. I just applied a different material to each painting. However, I did make that static mesh inside UDK, I guess that doesn't really count.

[Max Power]

Yes I can see the inspiration:
http://www.gamershell.com/pc/harry_p...reenshots.html

Nothing wrong with keeping things simple. A few things to help you succeed in this area:

Darken things up, a lot. Let corners fade into darkness, give every light a source, and let the darkness hide lower detail areas mainly lighting important, walkable floors.

Because your geometry is simple, keep your materials simple. You can select any BSP surface (or just select them all by right clicking on one > select surfaces > select all surfaces), and in the Scaling, give it a simple scaling of 4 or even 8 depending on how it looks. With the textures themselves, keep the level of noise and realism down, trying to stick to big shapes and a painterly look. While this doesn't mean it has to be a cartoon, the idea it to make things blend together better while keep the job easier on you.