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Disco Elysium Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
Hey thanks, LESS T_T. Here, let me crack it open for the rest of you:

I wrote up a short post about what goes into our backgrounds. I’ll do that by elaborating on one of the screenshots from our recent press release (Read it here), namely the moody one with the bad-ass car and the rain and the big building.

001.png


I worked on that – the Perikarnassian church. It is one of the landmarks in the game and even before I began our AD Aleksander had made this early mood concept (that’s the image above).

The environment started changing during production. First, the area is newly sketched out (like here) and a rough 3D block-in of the landscape and buildings etc gets done in Blender. At this point I look at lots of references, sketch some and discuss my ideas with the writers and the AD. Eventually I end up with this:

002.png


Based on this sketch I do some variations before going into more detail and minute variations, below, along with the original idea and the rough block-in for comparison.

003.png


As you can see by the green tick – at first we went with that one. We had to press on and before I could give it to Mikk for modeling I drew up a slightly more detailed image. In this phase I tried out some colors that would fit the mood of the place. Meanwhile I got to work on the church interior. As this is something you won’t be seeing today I’ll fast forward a bit :)

004.png


When you compare the model to the concept you’ll see that it has gone through some changes again. The isometric perspective can be a harsh mistress. From some angles you lose detail and other angles butcher the silhouette. In Blender I went back in and made both smaller and larger modifications to the model. There, now we could basically put it in the game! It just needs materials.

005-739x1024.png


Here’s the render of the church where I’ve applied base textures and tweaked the model some more – note the angle of the roof, the tower didn’t really work visually before and I attached a balcony/boardwalk to its side among other details. Now the render’s composites (the various maps our custom shaders use) went back to Rostov, who gave it a paintover.

church-paintover-739x1024.png


Et Voila! Ain’t a thing. Thanks for tuning in.

006.png
 

Prime Junta

Guest
I'm... hyped.

For the first time in years. I had almost forgotten what it's like.
 

BobtheTree

Savant
Joined
Nov 22, 2011
Messages
389
Just now seeing this for the first time. Looks quite good. Digging the art style.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
A new blog post about how they're clothing characters (inb4 the tech guy also pop in this thread): http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2016/06/20/new-tech-day-occluding-clothes/

Hi there! Here’s a quick writeup of how we occlude wearables, mainly for coming back to when future me is puzzled over his past decisions.

No Truce’s fantastical realism does not lend itself to clearly distinguishable character classes that look so much alike you could get away with just a texture swap. What we have is more or less everyday clothes on more or less (mostly less) everyday people. That calls for underwear, shirts, pants, boots, coats, hats, gloves, etc. In other words, a truckload of assets to be combined in a truckload of ways. That, in turn, means a lot of mesh clipping if you’re not careful. The problem with careful is that it’s time consuming and not fun at all.
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
I'm sure I need to write something to watch this thread isn't it? )
Btw, I'll create theme on Russian forem about the game, right now.
 

Atchodas

Augur
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
1,047
This seems very interesting , lets hope it gets released before 2020 , estonians are known for they unnatural speed ( soooooo fakin slow )

Really just want to "watch" the thread same as guy above , best of luck wth your project
 

Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
Made a thread on some Russian forum, of some game-site that consist almost entirely of Ukrainians+Russian born liberals, I hope it will help lol.
 
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Ziem

Arbiter
Joined
May 17, 2014
Messages
324
First Tranny, now this. These fucking titles nowadays..
 

Kasparov

OH/NO
Developer
Joined
Jun 10, 2016
Messages
930
Location
ZA/UM
Well good luck with this. :salute:
This seems very interesting , lets hope it gets released before 2020 , estonians are known for they unnatural speed ( soooooo fakin slow )

Really just want to "watch" the thread same as guy above , best of luck wth your project

My favourite anecdote is on the very subject: "Three Estonian paratroopers hovered over the city for three days" ("Три дня эстонские парашютисты висели над городом"). And thanks!

Made a thread on some Russian forum, of some game-site that consist almost entirely of Ukrainians+Russian born liberals, I hope it will help lol.
Cheers and thanks! Share the link? :obviously:

Sadly, no Russian translation. Like in whole Estonia not even single person can speak Russian.
You´ve got to take that up with the book´s publisher, I think. Or beg Robert and throw $$$ at him. I think he´ll like that. If there´s enough interest, perhaps a Russian translation becomes an option eventually.

First Tranny, now this. These fucking titles nowadays..
Oh yeah, and we´re back!

Meanwhile any of you guys miss last weeks art post? Well, here you go;
Art Director Alexander Rostov tells about how he arts the art:



I always enjoy learning how other artists work and seeing how images come together. In that spirit I have taken to a habit of saving periodic work in progress shots of my own pieces as I spend time on them. Here’s a rundown on a piece of concept art relating to a more run down part of Martinaise.



There’s a general back and forth over many quick and ugly thumbnails where we get a basic idea of what’s what with the writers. This is where most of the level design gets worked out. We talk through what the main plot points dictate for the area, we figure out pathways how the player should move through the location and make sure there’s elevation changes so the bare geometry of the area looks good and casts interesting shadows. The player is free to pan the camera around as they please but each location is designed with a certain composition in mind. There’s a an abstract shape to each area that subconsciously feeds into the atmosphere and how the player perceives a location. There’s an asymmetric balance to the region where the center of mass lies on the field amidst the huddle of houses with a protrusion leaping out. In artist-speak there’s “tension” in that.



I block the level with basic 3d shapes and we test it in engine to see how good the distances and sense of scale feel. From here it’s pretty useful to just screencap the block-in from the viewport, run a find edges filter on it in Photoshop and use that as the underlay on which to start drawing. The light grey lines up there are just that.



This is the “draw the rest of the fucking owl” step. Finishing up on the linework. When thinking about what exactly to draw and what reference material to gather I want to avoid generic finishing village photos lest it becomes another place you’ve already been. Instead I look for photos of old dachas. Point is that poor people live here, not ye old timey fisherman cosplayers.



Once the drawing is sufficiently far along I start blocking in the shapes with flat fill colors. As I go along I go back and draw some more bits and pieces here and there since I’m impatient like that. But the idea is to start getting some sense of what the scene might actually look like. For convenience I keep every shape on its own layer so I can search around for colours by just dragging the hue slider around on each individual shape and layer.



Another bonus to keeping stuff on seperate layers is I can lock the opacity for each of them which allows me to take a wild textured brush to the canvas without fear of ruining the edges. It’s a good technique in general for more illustrative pieces where the point is to convey practical information rather than to show off the brush stroke of a painting.



The shadows here come from the 3d block in I made earlier. I multiply it over the image and clean up where needed and add bits and pieces to the shadow layer where I’ve drawn new stuff not present in the block in. There’s a bit more to do but it’s mostly just detailwork and cleanup, it’s pretty much done by now.

And here’s the final piece:


 
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Fenix

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
Jul 18, 2015
Messages
6,458
Location
Russia atchoum!
Cheers and thanks! Share the link? :obviously:

Of course! Here your monocled link. :D

You´ve got to take that up with the book´s publisher, I think. Or beg Robert and throw $$$ at him. I think he´ll like that. If there´s enough interest, perhaps a Russian translation becomes an option eventually.
Oh, I understand that all is not so simple, understand publishers business.
Sadly book business in Russia is slowly dying, book-shops are closing and so on.
I can beg him, but sadly I can't thow $$$ at him - I have none. )))
I for myself feel that interest, but for business with publishers it should be some promoute work I think, something that professional can do.
I only know that Moscow regularly hosts book festivals of all sizes, where are presented and sold books, even a very small publishing houses.
That is, there is quite successfully sold quite niche books, interesting only to a narrow audience.
You can count on the recoupment with only one Moscow - in the end in Moscow live 1/10 of the total population of Russia.
I'm really want to read something fresh, non-ordinary, because Russian literature is plagued by "writers" that "write" series like two (2!) book in year, I'm talking about fantasy, science fiction (which didn't exist today in Russia), "soft" science fiction.
In can hardly be called like literature, rather "painting toilet paper".

Btw you should make some efforts to introduce youself to some Russian gameing sites. Russia traditionally love RPG, more then that it love hardcore RPG, which is how I can probably describe your game. )
You need sites that have same hardcore audience, I can recommend ex-RPG CORE, now C.O.R.E. Codex of RPG Elucidation (Phew! how pretentious, also while I spit on them and never miss an opportunity to tell about that because of some conflict, you should use their coverage).
For example I checked them - there is V. D. Weller article about indie studious (you also better read it just in case), there is Tranny-related article, even crappy Technomancer have article there! -

- but not you!

It should not be that way. Contact them.

Also, there is riorpixels - I'll give you quick peek about them, it is founded by one of the best (GAME.EXE was the best) game jornos in Russia that wrote about PC stuff, after owner of previous site kicked them out. Today however, they are pale shadows of themselves, their interests mostly about console shit, but they kept part of their previous hardcore audience.
Also, their staff consist from people of Ukrainian descent, the rest staff are liberal shit that live mostly in Moscow (and I spit on them too lol), so they probably will like your probable not-so-friendly-toward-Russia stance (don't tell it is not, I don't care, and this will kill all positive moments for liberal game press).
 
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Joined
Sep 18, 2013
Messages
1,258

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