Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 3

Another busy week comes to an end and another week where I fall further behind my schedule. I think I did a lot of good work this week, but everything is just taking way longer than I had hoped.

First of all this weeks work:

I jumped around a lot in what I worked on to not get stuck on anything. I worked first on the horse and went back to it several times. The base mesh is almost done and ready for sculpting and texturing and making armour. The big reason I didn't finish is that I have not decided how I will handle the mane which will be a pain if I want it to look nice. I could definitely have called this done at an earlier point, but the more I get into this project the better I want it to be.

What I spend even more time on than the horse was the knight. I decided to go all out on the quality of this model, since I will be using the same model for the squire model which will have a face and uncovered hands.

In between struggling with the horse and the knight I worked on other little things like the tent, which I decided to spend a bit of time taking almost to completion to get an idea of how my final assets would look. I'm pretty happy with the result I was able to get with some clever modelling and cutout transparency for some of the cloth.

I also spent some time doing some tests on making sky-boxes which I have never done before and feel like I found a really good way of making them, the current one is just a poorly made one out of some images I found on google, but I think it shows the idea.

As you can see in the above image I also added some temporary trees which are just simple planes with another googled image on. I actually spent a few hours playing around with building my own detailed trees and I went about it in a horrible way. I'll revisit this later if I need real trees, otherwise I'll just paint a good 2D texture myself and do planes.

Other things I worked on that are not really worth showing yet was a barrel and the tilt divide.

So I'm a bit disappointed with my results this week, hopefully next week I will have a bunch of finished assets to show off instead.

So onto the schedule, obviously I'm falling behind, so I'm pushing the schedule a week, here is an updated version:

Schedule

Week 1-3: Done

Week 4: Finish all the modelling and texturing of the knight, the squire, the horse, the lance, the shield and the quintain. These are all the models that are close up and will affect functionality since they will be rigged. If there is any time left, start rigging or work on the remaining models.

Week 5. Make a version of the game with the two mini games, and the first arena with real graphics (use hero knight for both players) and a menu. Put the game on itch.io and have people on Reddit try it out.

Weeks 6-9: Build the rest of the game. Model the remaining models and implement the different knights with different difficulty. Game should be feature complete. Upload updated version to itch.io and get more feedback / bugs.

Weeks 10-12: Implement sound and music and polish and fix bugs. SUBMIT GAME!!!

So as you can see I've basically just stolen a week from sound and bug fixes to have another modelling / texturing week. Next week looks pretty unrealistic as well, but I do know that I'm over the worst modelling wise with having basically finished the good base meshes for the two most complicated things.

The current week 5 is where things will get really hairy, just doing the rigging and animation for the horse, the knight and the squire, will take a lot of time and then I should actually also make the gameplay work quite a bit better before I show it off to anyone, but I really want to get to a place where I have pretty decent graphics and gameplay and I can show it off...