Today is my birthday and to celebrate this incredible achievement of surviving for so many years, I thought I'd update all of you with what I'm working on.
I spent the main bulk of my time since the last update making the high polycount character models into optimized game ready assets. I had to retopologize the models to a lower polycount (each character is only about 8000 tris), then I had to bake the normal and diffuse maps for each character. So in the past month it was 12 models from scratch, each of those models now has 4 textures (diffuse, normal, skin mask,emission) so that's 48 textures in total which may seem like a lot, but the performance of the game is still great since every character has a single material so that makes one draw call per character. While working on all of the models I'm trying to keep it as optimized as possible.
To make the dismemberment possible on the characters, every mesh had to be split into seperate parts.
These are all seperate meshes weighted to the same skeleton, so certain parts can be hidden and other parts revealed during runtime.
So just to make the dismemberment gameplay mechanic possible I have to make 216 meshes in total for the 12 characters.
Right now 3 characters are fully done and on the 9 left I only have to rig them to the skeleton and split the meshes.
Once that is done the last thing left to do on the models is to add shape keys for the facial expressions. I think about 80 percent of the work on the characters is done.
Once the characters are done I'll be working on the environment.