I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated, but there hasn’t been a lot going on that’s particularly showable.  My Perforce checkins show that in the past few months I have…

• Used a landscape generation tool called Gaia to generate custom baked landscapes that I can use for specific locales or pre-constructed sections of the overworld.
• Created a home base area for the player to start in.
• Project movement grid information on the ground to help navigate some areas.  I’ll still work on making sure that they are clearly traversable.

• Added characters from Fuse in there, using some of the pretty good tools to grab some animations and basic clothing setups.
• Enlisted the help of my wife Sandra to help get some characters together!  Nice being able to construct characters as easily as you would in a game like Skyrim.  And so far it’s free (knock on wood).
• I’m still considering how I want to show characters in general.  I liked having them when I had a 2D game because it was easy to see what everybody was, but by going 3D I’m going to have some trouble with parseability.  I’m already scaling things up larger-than-life, but even more might be needed for humans.

• Got together some basic quest granting, as well as a main stats screen for players to track the quests they’re on.
• I also realized that I probably didn’t want a traditional quest system…  I’m not out to make Wasteland 3 or anything.  So, I’ve got the system but I’ll be working on evolving it to work even better with generated content.

• Started thinking harder about the overworld experience.  There’s a lot of back and forth that happened here…  very briefly I thought about creating only one overworld zone and generating only content within.  However, performance considerations, as well as the interesting gameplay that can happen in the overworld, I decided to break it into sectors that include both generated and prebuilt areas.
• Started to move towards the exaggerated scale I want to hit with chunky buildings and roads, but areas on the map with interesting states to deal with.

• Experimented with a number of ways to put roads on a generated terrain mesh, and so far have settled on Easy Decal 3D, which is a bit quirky but that’s pretty standard with Unity asset bundles.  I think it has a good set of features and make it run performant, if I can just work around some of the funky bits.
• I’m hoping this approach will work.  It is the most dynamic, and would hold up best for generated terrain, but it’s also eaten a good chunk out of my frame rate and needs optimization.

This is all on top of investigation, data loading/saving, performance, and other things.  Hmm.  So yeah, I guess I was actually pretty busy over July.  Still hoping to get back to working on city combat stuff soon.