Roads! or.. streets? either way... we got 'em.
I think its a good time to give a quick explanation of Binary Betrayals style and design goals. The style of meant to be an amalgamation of styles from 5th and 6th gen consoles as well as PC games from the time, especially source engine games.. To achieve this I've been doing a few things and also have plans for further things in the future. What I've done so far: Textures are packed into trim sheets for specific things (like the exterior of the convenient store in the photo above) where textures are resized so that roughly 6-10 feet = 256 pixels. After that the images are dithered using no specific threshold, just what visually looks right for each trim sheet. For an extra unique twist roughly 90% of textures will be real life photo scanned textures that I personally have taken in my home town. The store in the photo is 100% photo scan textures on the exterior and so is the stop sign. Ultimately I will then bake the textures and create additional maps for more unique look and feel.
I am going with a low/mid poly design for characters and utilizing smooth and sharp shading. Old source games are a main inspiration for the modeling style within the characters and buildings. The characters have low poly counts but still have convincing topology that allow textures to create a detailed low cost character model. The building are built using simple geometry as if make with BSP brushes in Hammer, and then will be embellished with finer details to create depth and detail as well and thorough storytelling through level design.
I am currently diving into the ins and out of HLSL (High Level Shader Language) and how shaders work. I would like to create a unique shader from scratch to use that is catered to my own art style. This will be a long process as it is actually an insane amount of things to learn.
Inspired by classic games I have decided to make this a "hub world" game. Where as a small portion of Chroma city acts as the hub where events and the storyline will tie back to. Leading towards certain paths to the edge of the hub will trigger different scenes to load with unique areas. This not only brings in a classic game design element but also acts as a way to efficiently iterate on the story mode and ability to create infinite nested areas without have to create an ever expanding (and increasingly demanding) world.
And that takes me to the final point, which I find to be most important. There are two main reasons for this style and design choice: I am only one man and can only do so much and also, I don't want to make a game people can't play.. I want this thing to run on a potato so anyone can play.