Mongul Raiders - Click for Larger Image

Today I was sculpting the first of the Bandit Tribes, a Mongol themed raiding party. They have excellent horsemanship and combat skills, but are weaker in trade and diplomacy skills. As the player works for an open-minded corporation you have the chance to hire a Mongul clansman and a troop of his warriors – but will you trust them not to double-cross you and strangle you in your sleep? Party morale plays a big part in the game, winning battles is only one of many ways to prove your leadership.

If you travel deeper into the Mongul lands you can uncover valuable Furs, Timber and Slaves so it is worth persevering against the border raids and developing a relationship with the clan leaders – a relationship based on Gold, Might, or even Friendship – you decide.

Adding horses to a game world is not an easy thing to do. The sculpting, animating, and AI behaviours required to model a four legged creature are all more than twice as complex as for a biped. But the steppe simply would not be the same without mounted scouts and fiendish bandits so horses had to be done to make the world of Spice Road suitably fast and dangerous.

Getting the shape of a horse right is hard enough on its own without worrying about the topology of the Lo-Poly mesh so I started by drawing some simple primitives over a reference picture in Curvy 3D.

Building a Lo-Poly Horse using Sketch Based Modelling

Curvy lets you draw curves to define the outline of a primitive – so it is quite easy over a reference photo. It was easy to correct mistakes and tweak the model at this stage because each primitive is separate and controlled by the curves – there are no triangles, patches, sub-d to worry about.

I merged the primitives into a 40,000 tri model, I could have used a higher resolution if I wanted to take it into ZBrush and detail a Hi-Poly version, but this was headed in the other direction to a low poly count so I could render a good number on screen in a battle. I used MeshLab and Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation to produce the Lo-Poly version.

This was a fast route to a Lo-Poly model, but the essential question was could it animate? I added a skeleton rig and tried out a classic Muybridge walk cycle:

Adding a rider and hooking up some gallop, charge and destroy AI produced the first Cavalry battle on the Spice Road. I can’t wait to add some sabre weilding bandits into the mix!

I’m making some test art assets to fill out the game world and give some basic components to hang gameplay on. So far this consists of a few buildings, some GUI components and an animated character. Stage 2 will be getting the gameplay tied in to the art so the core gameplay works.

I know other people like to start with bare bones no-art prototypes, but for me the art is as much a part of the game world as the backstory, combat logic and the upgrade paths – ie: Fundamental.

It has been a hard couple of days remembering how to animate, looking for reference material and struggling with keyframes. On my indie budget I can afford approximately zero software, so I have written my own keyframe animation studio, to go with my own modelling and 3D painting tools. While these have some upfront time costs it is much easier to pull off clever tricks to improve my productivity. For example I only have to animate one half of the walk cycle and the other half is automatic.

I am a bit rusty with keyframing – but I suspect I will be getting lots of practice soon!

Edit: Thanks to a hint on TigSource, I updated the walk with the arms swinging in the right phase to the legs – I must have been too close to spot the mistake (Working in mainly the front and side views it is easy to mistake the left and right arms.)

Today I’ve been prototyping a character model that will be one of the main soldiers in the battles you fight.

I used Curvy 3D 2.0 to paint this Lo-poly model. In the game I hope to fit 1000’s of these guys on screen so they will appear quite tiny.