Continuing Week 5-6 Part 3: New Town

The next thing I took care of for the town was making materials for the  remaining house props. This includes the balcony, doors, and windows:

I started by building a concrete base for the frames of these props:

As  for the doors and windows, I wanted to make sure that they vary in  color. That way they aren't painted the same and the town doesn't look  copy pasted. Therefore I painted the door and window materials white so I  can afterwards multiply it by any color in a shader. This is a very  cheap and easy trick to ensure I don't make textures for every possible color of door (could be dozens). 

The  cool thing about using Substance Painter is that everything is  procedural. This dramatically reduces the work needed to paint models  because the work you do for 1 model can be applied to other models  instantly in a drag and drop fashion.  

This  is why Substance Painter is my 2nd favorite program in the whole world,  because it abandons the old fashioned way of making game textures via  photoshop in favor of a much more robust and fast alternative. I also  built a typical rock texture that is seen very often in Mexico: 

The results are pretty good so far and very cheap in performance.  
Overall it's starting to piece together.

I  made sure to make some buildings look different than the rest to give  good looking variation to the town. The building bellow will be an ice  cream shop.  

Pretty  much all materials have been finished and actual game related work can  now start. This includes making LOD models for some props to reduce the  overall poly count in the screen, making physics hulls to interact with  each model, and ensuring everything is performant. I've already started  on a related subject which involves the sound of the town. Calpico has  made dozens of new ambient sounds to make the town feel like there is  activity in the town. There are random roosters, horses, dogs, and misc  sounds that will randomly play every so often to make the town feel  lively. This prompted a rewrite to the sound and ambience system of the  game. It is now much more robust, optimized, and will allow for the  aforementioned random variety in different zones of the map.

I  plan to record a YouTube video in the next 2 days to showcase the  upcoming features of v0.75 which is now really close. No hard date yet  (until the YouTube video) but I'm guessing it will release in about 2~3  weeks. Beta for supporters will be in about 1 week.  

Stay tuned!