Game Assets

[ryanlii]

Where did you get the game assets from or did you make them all in studio? Also for the vegetation, did you use SpeedTree? The assets in this game look wonderful and I want to create a landscape like this one.

[LevaOpaki]

Vegetation is in house made and we used SpeedTree.

[ryanlii]

Originally posted by LevaOpaki:

Vegetation is in house made and we used SpeedTree.

What about for everything else? Clothing, weapons, skybox, textures, etc.

[Deda Stojko]

Originally posted by cukgod:

What about for everything else? Clothing, weapons, skybox, textures, etc.

Majority of game models are custom, we did acquire some of the models and still most of them had to be rearranged. Procedure usually goes like this - if we need to make something, first we see if that particular thing has been already done. If it was done, then we check for the quality. If quality and price is OK in terms that in-house development would cost us less than what we would pay for the model/animation then we buy it. Now there, sometimes you buy things because you need to save time too, so that our developers can produce other things. Usually we buy generic items that are the same for everybody. For example there is no need to model a soda can because it is a quite generic and cheap to buy it (unless ofc if you have junior modelers then soda cans are good models for practice) :)
Second thing we buy are animations, because for small developers it is quite hard to get AAA quality of moves. In our case we did acquire several movement animations pack, BUT a downside of that is that all these generic pack do not provide you with all animations, so at the end you still have to make your own stuff... So as for the animations around 50% we have bought and the rest were recorded in-house with our mocap devices. When you use low to mid range mocap devices there is a lot ow work that you have to do to polish them so that they look good. For example only for basic rifle handling there was over 200 different animations that we had to do. The movement cycle (because of our inertia system) has also 200+ different animations. This is huge amount of work that has to be done, but at the end it is worth it.
Most of the combat moves were recorded in-house and although they look decent enough, once the game gets in EA we will probably hire some AAA mocap studio to make things better.

As for the other stuff, everything regarding the level design is fully custom made, so all buildings, trees, rocks, foliage is ours. We spent already one year to produce content for the levels. We would gladly buy some of these things, but since we chose Mediterranean and Continental setting for the game (that is common for Croatian land), there aren't any resources that we could buy, so we had to build everything by ourselves.
For sky we use True sky plugin, but we are not satisfied with how it works, it's rather amateurishly built and support is lame too, so we might switch for something in the future.
Clothes, gear and characters are scanned by using photogrammetry that we did in-house, all shaders, including skin shader are ours too.
The same goes for textures, because the setting is unique we had to go on Croatian coast and take pictures of interesting locations, so majority of textures are done by us. If we were buying stuff like textures then we couldn't get the real Mediterranean atmosphere. You just cannot combine random textures with random lighting and set it up in the world in hope that everything will fit nicely. This is something that you learn when you are game dev for 15+years :)
Now when it comes to weapons, we have acquired some models, and some of them are ours. Right now you can find almost perfect replica of every weapon known to men, so there is no point to waste your time to make one.. it's better to use that time to make gameplay better.

All crafting items are done in-house too and we have hundreds of them... so finally if you ask me about the percentage of stuff that we bought, I'd say that it is around 3- 5% of all game content.

[ryanlii]

Originally posted by Deda Stojko:

Originally posted by cukgod:

What about for everything else? Clothing, weapons, skybox, textures, etc.

Majority of game models are custom, we did acquire some of the models and still most of them had to be rearranged. Procedure usually goes like this - if we need to make something, first we see if that particular thing has been already done. If it was done, then we check for the quality. If quality and price is OK in terms that in-house development would cost us less than what we would pay for the model/animation then we buy it. Now there, sometimes you buy things because you need to save time too, so that our developers can produce other things. Usually we buy generic items that are the same for everybody. For example there is no need to model a soda can because it is a quite generic and cheap to buy it (unless ofc if you have junior modelers then soda cans are good models for practice) :)
Second thing we buy are animations, because for small developers it is quite hard to get AAA quality of moves. In our case we did acquire several movement animations pack, BUT a downside of that is that all these generic pack do not provide you with all animations, so at the end you still have to make your own stuff... So as for the animations around 50% we have bought and the rest were recorded in-house with our mocap devices. When you use low to mid range mocap devices there is a lot ow work that you have to do to polish them so that they look good. For example only for basic rifle handling there was over 200 different animations that we had to do. The movement cycle (because of our inertia system) has also 200+ different animations. This is huge amount of work that has to be done, but at the end it is worth it.
Most of the combat moves were recorded in-house and although they look decent enough, once the game gets in EA we will probably hire some AAA mocap studio to make things better.

As for the other stuff, everything regarding the level design is fully custom made, so all buildings, trees, rocks, foliage is ours. We spent already one year to produce content for the levels. We would gladly buy some of these things, but since we chose Mediterranean and Continental setting for the game (that is common for Croatian land), there aren't any resources that we could buy, so we had to build everything by ourselves.
For sky we use True sky plugin, but we are not satisfied with how it works, it's rather amateurishly built and support is lame too, so we might switch for something in the future.
Clothes, gear and characters are scanned by using photogrammetry that we did in-house, all shaders, including skin shader are ours too.
The same goes for textures, because the setting is unique we had to go on Croatian coast and take pictures of interesting locations, so majority of textures are done by us. If we were buying stuff like textures then we couldn't get the real Mediterranean atmosphere. You just cannot combine random textures with random lighting and set it up in the world in hope that everything will fit nicely. This is something that you learn when you are game dev for 15+years :)
Now when it comes to weapons, we have acquired some models, and some of them are ours. Right now you can find almost perfect replica of every weapon known to men, so there is no point to waste your time to make one.. it's better to use that time to make gameplay better.

All crafting items are done in-house too and we have hundreds of them... so finally if you ask me about the percentage of stuff that we bought, I'd say that it is around 3- 5% of all game content.

Wow... That's incredible that you guys made such a fantastic looking game. Keep up the good work and I can't wait for EA!

[M1glareN]

Nice honest write up, I like that you're so honest and open compared to 99% of other game studios. Keep it up.

[ryanlii]

Originally posted by M1glareN:

Nice honest write up, I like that you're so honest and open compared to 99% of other game studios. Keep it up.

Yeah haha that was very admirable they took the time to do that.

[M1glareN]

Well it's a good way to get customers that aren't mindless pre order sheeps and that actually don't throw cash at devs without them deserving it. :)