Ignoring your joke and saying yes, actually. Maybe not 100, but variants would be nice. One of the larger draws for me and what I include as a major differentiator of Boundless and Minecraft is the idea of props. But if we’re just having one table, one chair, there’s no difference in terms of props.
I know nothing about specific abilities of the tools the dev team is using or the process of building designs into props and linking them with crafting templates, etc…but it seems conceptually rather easy to approach building furniture like building creatures/buildings/vehicles in spore, which I know at least one dev has worked on. Very easy to add and remove components, add textures and colors, etc. And I know rigs are already being used for creatures, so it seems like the team should maybe use them for objects too? Again, I know very little of the process and even less of the development tools, but I wouldn’t mock one of the features that helps best set this game apart from minecraft so lightly.
I think she just says that because she’s not in charge of such a decision and you never make absoulte promises on the internet/ in the gaming industry^^
I agree, thus my use of “conceptually”…in fact the only time I used “just” in my post was…[quote=“Clexarews, post:41, topic:3308”]
But if we’re just having one table, one chair, there’s no difference in terms of props.
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I threw out a bunch of disclaimers stating my lack of knowledge of the Boundless developers tools or processes.
But I also work in the software industry and it seems silly to me that in 2015 there is a program that doesn’t include some ability to point and click to apply a pattern or color based on a template or pre-determined setting that they could use to add a few variants with relative ease (versus building a new one from scratch for each variant or building and design new combat systems, a progression system, new creature types, etc.).
In other words, I’m not buying that adding furniture variants is on a one-to-one scale with developing new races, creatures, wearables, or any of the various systems that have yet to be worked on. However, to be fair, this was just the meaning that I inferred from reading @jesshyland’s post and she probably didn’t mean it to be read that way.
As in devs should be able to add a structural/color/pattern variants based on these tools to the game and make it so that depending on the materials, positioning, etc. the objects change into these variants.
The only issue I see there being isn’t in designing and adding the variants but in mapping the variants to new crafting patterns in-game because I know nothing of this workflow.
I really like the runners, but maybe that should be an option later down the line. While I am excited to have props (interactable please :)) much more interested in other gameplay features. Keep up the great work!
But just imagine how creative we would get! Walls of chairs, chair roofs, chair walkways (chairways?), chair trees, monster chairs, gateway chairs, chair titans, bacon chairs.
The factors that came before the end product of the concept art that we see now must be what jesshy was talking about. A lot of planning, rough concepts, and group discussions must have been done before they were allowed to show just a speck of their progress.
Didn’t you also say that a creature creator like spore would be too complicated to make?
Which comes down to what james said in the past:
Not sure if this is still true today.
(Sorry I kind of went on a tangent there, I just started recalling a lot of stuff on this forum as I was trying to speculate what the devs might be going through. ><)
This is actually kind of my point. It seems weird to design and showcase variants without actually planning to ever implement them. Seems like a bunch of lost design time if the plan is to launch 1.0 with only 1 of everything. Wouldn’t it be easier then to internally choose 1 design to focus on and then show it off as a prop in-game instead of putting in the time to design all of these different choices?
I didn’t. They did. You found James’ quote.[quote=“Clexarews, post:41, topic:3308”]
approach building furniture like building creatures/buildings/vehicles in spore
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I think the key word here is “like”. I’m simply trying to say that IF the dev’s software allows them to easily add color, patterns, component (like mini-props (table legs, etc.)), then it seems like they should be able to use those tools rather easily to modify certain props into variants rather than just designing and implementing an entirely new prop each time they want a variant. IF the software does not allow them to do this, that is sad given what this game is trying to accomplish.
I see them more like drafts so it isn’t weird at all. You always make multiple things to test things out and then take the best x number of the designs.
I saw them that way too, then realized it’d likely be easier to just make sketches internally and choose instead of fleshing out a bunch of variants that potentially have no life anyway.
I don’t want this question to be lost amid my arguments that, conceptually, creating variants from a rig-like system takes less time than creating items from scratch. I think the question is FAR more important and would love to hear more about it.
conceptually, creating variants from a rig-like system takes less time than creating items from scratch.
Less time, indeed! But less time is not no time, and there are more valuable things we can be putting our time into at this point in development than making a large collection of chairs. There is no magic software that will generate assets for us automatically, and while I am quite experienced at working in a modular fashion to optimise variant generation it still takes valuable time and ultimately, each model is still made by hand.
As for ‘item progression’ - you’ll want to ask a designer about that, and not assume anything drastic from my off-hand comments. It’s not a discussion I’ve been part of, I just make the assets when I’m asked to
None of this is to suggest one chair is all you will ever get! Only that we are starting out by making one chair and one table. Later, we might make more. We know having lots of options for customisation is important to y’all, but as professionals we also have a good idea of how long it takes to make things and how best to invest our time and resources
