So I've been doing a lot of asset creation/experimentation the past weekish and have decided in on some stuff. None of this is final, obviously, but I thought I would post about it anyways. I guess this is kind of turning into a psuedo-blog. Oh well.
Unreal Engine 4 is pretty awesome with its asset creation. There's a lot I'm already doing with it, and I'm pretty sure I've only touched the ice cube at the top of the iceburg. I've only created 2 tree meshes, but can set it up so that you can assign materials to certain parts of the mesh. Because of this, I'm able to have various bark colors and various leaf colors. Shown below, you can see the greyish bark, and three types of leaves colors (Dark Red, Red and Orange. Second bark color not shown, but it's more of a brown).
In the background, you can also see a bright red post thing, and some blue squares. Those are parts of the map that are interactable with the Fire and Water attunements (respectively). I didn't want to necessarily confine those two elements to a single prop type of thing, like always a door, or always a crash in a wall. To solve this, I've created props that can be semi-logically placed around parts of the environment where these attunements interact. I think that this could be interesting and would keep things a little more open in terms of design.
You can see the new assets for everything in this picture, along with some of the modular pieces that I designed. These are things that I'll definitely be wanting to use for the game, and things that made sense. If something is affected by an attunement, its colors and effects match that attunements primary color. So the green teleporter goes with Earth, and the white jump pad, with its vertical moving particle effects, go with Air. More generic items are brown/yellow, like the box and button mechanic.
Myself and my friend (Noah) are actively working on the next version of Elementalist and its future. We don't know when that will be, so if you're interested in the game and its future, pay attention to this thread, or
follow me on twitter.
Thanks everyone for the continued support and feedback!
EDIT: Next thing coming up will be beginning Level Design (finally) and block out of levels! ... and figure out the ground shader.