This is more of a question to all readers. Do you think a sexy femail character is more attractive thank an awesome detail armor wearing cool guy?

 

 

Visit Our Kickstarter MMO Game Project at:

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/746015392/emperors-forge

Visit Our Kickstarter MMO Game Project At  

 

I'm no artist, so for the game I'm developing like most programmers I search around the network and buy my assets all sort of places; from TurboSquid to Dexsoft or 3DRT and the Unity Asset Store, and there hasn't been once were the assets are just good enough to simply import and use (in my case now importing to Unity). I'm not saying they are bad, just that if they were meant for games why not take the extra care. The time I spend readying up models to use in my game as is around 5 times the time I spend coding ;(; and for an indie developer, time is a luxurious commodity.
 
The most frustrating thing is acquiring assets without animations and after you take the time to retarget Mocap animations you realize they are so poorly skinned that you have to start from zero with them. Please test your skinning guys test, test, and re-test :) When it comes to bone structure is just madness, there should be something like a W3C standard when it comes to humanoid skeletons... Please guys use these tips when releasing models to the public: remove unused artist helper bones like footsteps and remove extra nodes like cameras or lights. With bone structures, shoulders should never be children of the neck bone, name bones correctly, and when you name a bone left, that means left from the model's perspective. Leave a root bone without animation or skinning and animate the hips if you want to translate the entire model. With geometry, try and always leave LOD versions, the same one’s you use to create the model and leave an uncombined version as well so we can use that to generate later content.
 
Anyways I got it off my chest... I can move on with life now :D so my advice to developers out there after much been let down by presentation images and videos that look amazing (thanks to the wonders of 3D cad applications) is: try before you buy, ask for a sample of the bone structure, as for multiple poses so you can validate skinning etc. but don't buy just because it looks good. And try to talk to the artist that's selling the model and ask for lots of specifications before you buy and if he is willing to make revisions of the model after you buy etc.
 

Visit Our Kickstarter MMO Game Project At

We just posted a freelance job on freelance.com and iFreeLance.com for less than 250 bucks to see if we can get an enthusiast, really good startup graphics designer, to mockup a user interface. While we work on the game mechanics and a bunch of stuff :), if the freelance job is successful, I will use his mockup to re-create all our user interface screens. Do you think going freelance on small things like the UI mockup is the right thing to do?

Hello friends, I couldn’t help myself and had to spend a bit of time thanking all the wonderful people that have supported Emperor’s Forge. I really hope you enjoy this small present.

Emperor’s Forge is not just my dream and my game, is your game. I can’t wait until the first demo is out to start taking requests from all of you and enhance the game with all your recommendations. The idea is to have all our backers be part of our development team, I know together, we can make this game happen and not only that, we can make a great game that evolves over time with new and fresh ideas.

This is absolutely only the beginning. I want this game to be entertaining in all forms and shapes; I want it to have eye popping graphics, sexy characters, horrible monsters, huge battles, never ending stream of stories (quests) toplay, lots of places to discover, socially rich and much more.

One thing before I let you go on with the video, the sexy girl dancing is one of the new characters I’m working on today; now please, enjoy the video, it’s a tribute to you!

 

Visit Our Project Page At:

 

We have been working hard on getting these characters to send you back to your home or spawn point for the homeless player :) The hardest part of AI is not really the fighting part though; path finding and obstacle avoidance is what really has kept me up late more than usual. Almost 3 AM and I really need to sleep :) I put up a small showroom with the enemy characters we are working on, most of the characters are finished with the exception of the ones you'll see doing nothing :) I really hope you enjoy this small video the same way I will enjoy my bed once I click post :) Happy new year for everyone and I mean absolutely everyone. Just the fact that any of you come by my blog is an honor.

Checkout the video at