Awesome concept art

I am very happy to announce that we have a new member for our group working on Gladius for a Gladiator!

I met Sakikatana, real name Annie, on the Reddit, a social networking service, where she posted this digital drawing she made of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It looked so cool that I wanted her to join my project. I sent her an email to ask if she was willing to join the project, and she said she will.

Annie's first assignment was to make a digital drawing of the busy street of Salernum, a city near Pompeii. I sent her many reference images for a historically accurate result. After a while she sent me a photo of her early progress.

Early progress

It looked great, and I really liked the style of the drawing, but some things did not fit for this age of play. For example, the door of the left building should not be there. She brushed away the few things that were wrong and sent me a new image again.

Sakikatana brushed away the flaws and added some color

The second image looked even better than the one I saw on reddit.com, and was colored in. The facial expressions of the people looked fantastic and the overall hue of the painting really impressed me.

After a few days, the painting was completely done, and Annie and I are satisfied with the result. It looks stunning.

A busy day in Salernum - Annie Wang

Player Inventory

The last weeks have gone by very fast. I managed to make an inventory system, using fantastic tutorial series by AfwfullMedia. These tutorials gave me a clue on the best approach for an inventory system.

The Database

I made an item database, where I can now easily add, edit or remove items. The item database is a list of item classes, each one containing a name, Id (for easy item access), description and more. I am considering making a custom editor script for my database, so I can give an apparel item other variables than a weapon.

The current Item Database

The future User Interface

The user interface of the inventory is copied from the one made by AwfullMedia in his tutorial series, but I want it to make it more like this The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim mod. I find this inventory very accessible and gives the player control over his items.

The current User Interface

 But that is something to do later. My inventory now looks more like a World of Warcraft inventory, which does not suit my game. You can drag and drop items, switch places, and remove them from your inventory. When you remove them they will be thrown into the scene. When you hove over an item in you inventory, it will create a tooltip containing information about the item. The inventory is also dynamic, meaning it will adjust itself to your screensize.

Dragging, dropping and a tooltip

Picking up

After tossing an item into the scene, you will be able to pick it up again. It will add the item to your inventory again and you can toss it again. The pick up is an extension I made without the use of AwfullMedia's tutorials.

The pickup inspector

The pickup looks ingame

Thank you AwfullMedia for you great tutorials!

Perfecting the village scene

Today I made new models to give life to the village scene. A few models are made by myself, others are downloaded from the asset store. You can download these assets youself here, here, here and here. I highly recommend these assets because they are almost AAA-quality models.

I also added some distance fog to give some depth so the renders and to make it more realistic. I would love to have this bound to a weather system. I already made a note of it on a post-it.

The  dowloaded models

I made the wall models myself, but they will probably be replaced in a later process of development because I do not know if this is historically accurate. I want gladius for a gladiator to be as realistic and accurate as possible. Here is a better image of the wall, feel free to give feedback below!

The wall models

New Helmets

Last week Jason modeled some helmets for the player to wear during the game. I think the models look fantastic:

The Helmets

These helmets are inspired on photo's I made in a museum in a museum (De Valkhof in Nijmegen, the Netherlands). He used the photo's as reference material to produce these models. Here are some photo's I took in the museum.