[Winter Games 2025] Escape from Vostorg

[yurembo]

Hello everybody!

This game is being held as part of the Winter Games 2025 tournament.
You play as a little girl trapped in the cloud town Vostorg. The town is under attack by zombies.

Your task is to help the girl escape the town and also complete several tasks: saving pets from certain death. Your toy gun has started firing bullets that are deadly to zombies.

 

[yurembo]

[yurembo]

One of the main challenges for a solo video game developer is art. It's no secret that any game, even a tiny one, needs hundreds of megabytes of images, models, textures, music, sounds, video installations and other digital data to make game worlds interesting, exciting and entertaining, sometimes funny, sometimes scary, but always emotional.

And since a solo developer works alone, he has to create all these digital things himself. When you work in a team where all the roles are distributed, you can do the most interesting thing for you, for example, programming, and let your colleagues do other, more boring things.

But an indie developer is deprived of such a privilege, but he has the entire vision of the project at his disposal.

For our specific case of participating in a gamejam, you can use additional services. I'm not calling for buying art for evergreen dollars. Especially at the beginning of the jam @Josh allowed us to use any art on the condition that the license for it would not be violated.

I want to share some very cheap or completely free art sources that I use to develop my game.

To create dynamic objects: characters, enemies, NPCs, I use a well-known website Mixamo.com . It can be used completely free of charge.

On the Characters tab, select the prepared character, then on the Animations tab, select the desired animation for it. Ready! The character is animated! Now you can download the character along with the animation to your computer in FBX format (using the Download button).

On Mixamo.com dozens of characters and even more animations have been prepared. In addition, you can create additional two-legged characters in Fuse, which can be downloaded for free on Steam. Please note that the skeleton in Mixamo is intended only for bipedal upright characters.

[yurembo]

I use assets from Unreal Engine 5 as a source for static objects. In this case, you can limit yourself to completely free asset sets, or you can purchase assets you like; fortunately, the Unreal Engine Marketplace offers a huge number of excellent assets.

Unreal Engine has a poor saving of objects in the FBX format. The objects it creates come out without materials, which is very bad. I have to save objects in the GLB format (fortunately, Leadwerks 5 can load objects from this format). However, in this case, animations are not saved in the asset; at least, Leadwerks 5 cannot load animations from this format. However, the resulting static objects are cool, perfect for decorating your game levels. Furthermore, in Leadwerks, you can create collisions for such an object, making it a functional addition to your game.

As I mentioned above, Leadwerks 5 can load both formats: FBX and GLB (GLTF). But animations can only be in the first of these. I'm not sure if this is a format limitation, or if @Josh hasn't finished the loader yet, but that's the current situation. I hope @Josh can clarify the situation.

However, Leadwerks 5's native format is MDL. Therefore, it makes sense to use the engine's internal converter to convert every object used in the game from the above formats to MDL. Not only you can save added object collisions in MDL, but objects saved in MDL load faster.

If you have any other art sources, please share them in the post below. I'd be very interested and helpful. And it would be really cool!

[Josh]

Leadwerks will load animations from glTF files. You can open the glTF file in another program to see if animations are included.

[yurembo]

When I save changes to a glb file using the internal editor, it gives the message:

[yurembo]

I understand: another editors can save animations in glb files, but an internal editor cannot.