I just passed another big milestone: all my maps are done.
One of my goals I made for myself when I started working on the game again last winter was to get a particular consistent look for all the characters and the maps. When I originally wrote BombSquad I had modeled a few maps in 3d and painted textures for them by hand, which looked alright but always felt a bit ‘generic-video-gamey’ to me (example). I decided I wanted to take the look of BombSquad in a more unique direction.
I love the look of real-life miniatures; things like stop-motion animated films or model train sets. Even when they’re not high quality, they have that physical, tangible appearance that makes them interesting to look at. When working in CG, whether for film or games, everything starts out geometric and perfect and it can be a huge challenge to make things look imperfect and dirty. However, with real life models you get that look ‘for free’. So to try and take advantage of that, I built all my maps in real life and then reconstructed them in 3d for the game, using the originals as textures and reference. Finally, I added some vignetting, depth of field, and various other filtering to my game engine to try to accentuate the imperfect, model-like look.
Here’s some of the results:
Some of these levels look truly awesome! I can’t wait to play it!