"Part of me misses working on Before We Leave, but it’s been so refreshing to work on a new project, especially being a part of the development from the beginning"
Hello all, it's Isaac here. Welcome to the new year!
For those of you who don't know me, I'm the Lead Programmer and Tech Artist at Balancing Monkey Games.
Last year was a blast. Finishing work on Before We Leave was bittersweet. Part of me misses working on it, but it’s been so refreshing to work on a new project, especially being a part of the development from the beginning.I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished in the first year of development.
I’ve mostly been working with Sam and Mereana (aka MJ) on implementing the core foundations of the new project. But I’ve also been working on shaders and other technical artist related stuff.
Last week I worked on improving our texture atlas builder. This will make creating texture atlases so much nicer and save a lot of time in the future. With Before We Leave we were manually putting new assets in Photoshop files and then editing the model UV’s in blender... that was not a fun job.
Other graphical things I’ve done recently are adding clouds to the new game (linked above) - it definitely helps make things feel like Before We Leave.
Also I’ve added some particle systems, for example the smoke and fire coming out of the Space Ship (pictured above).
Before we went on break, Tom and I worked on improving how the playable area integrates with the space whale. That involved tweaking the terrain generation and Tom working on the space whale model and texturing.
Here's what it looked like before:
And here's what it looks like now:
I’ve done many other things that I’ve worked on, but I’m writing this on Friday and my brain is currently empty.
Thank you for reading, I hope you've enjoyed looking at what I've been up to over the past few months.
- Isaac
