@@Otakubro6 it's not technically a downgrade, considering making a game by yourself is already hard af, making super realistic looking stuff is basically impossible unless you want to spend the rest of your life making your game, and since you'll have to settle for simpler graphics, it's much better to base them off the old stuff that still looks good and make your simpler graphics look more appealing. it's about having a clearer vision of what you want your game to look like, since you're trying to replicate a specific style. you could very well just do what you can and think is enough for every piece of your game, but if you don't have a specific 'look' in mind for your game, it's probably gonna end up looking kinda ugly, for example, look at "asset flips" games, which are usually made with a lot of assets that have already been created and you can get in the unity store or wherever else, these games usually look really bad because even if they use high quality textures and models, they're all over the place, meanwhile you look at a game like ULTRAKILL, that replicates the PS1 era graphics perfectly, and it all looks amazing, even though it's obviously not "modern graphics" and it's technically a purposeful "downgrade"
Ah, memories. I was working as a character modeler during the PS2 era and I remember creating assets with these kinds of polycount and texture size limitations. There were definitely other limits at that time which aren't really relevant anymore if you're just going for the look of the PS2 game assets(like low influence bone count per vert when skinning/weightpainting) . I know you started from a base mesh for the character, but if you ever wanted to create something from scratch(like a creature or a human), you can use a modeling technique that we often used at the time called "cylindrical modeling". It's a variation of the box-modeling style but it allows you to really control and manage polybudgets. Because you can determine overall polycount by either using 8-sided, 6-sided, or even 5-sided cylinders(lowest you can go while still maintaining a "cylindrical" shape with gouraud shading before you get to box shapes). You shape out the body, arms, legs, tail, whatever, as separate cylinders before you start cutting into them and joining them together.
thanks for this! I used cylinders as my primitives for the bases over cubes most of the time, way easier than using unfilled vertexes or subdividing cubes
Reminds me of Airport Inc., an airport management game from 2000. The graphics were 3d but the models were so low-poly the airplanes had triangular engines. I guess anything can be a barrel if you are desperate enough. Then again the game looked ugly even back at the time so I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make tbh...
i’m really really glad to see PS2 graphics getting more attention-even if the same hardware limitations that defined the PS1 aren’t present, the aesthetic is still amazing and deeply nostalgic and worth remembering i am very very interested in this project and whatever team re:liminality will do in the future
HOLY SHIT.. ive been obsessed with ps2 games for super long and im an aspiring indie dev who also wants to make ps2 styled indie games and watching this video inspired me so much for my passion projects, its really hard to find other game devs who talk about making ps2 styled games so it was a huge relief finding this video. Im really excited to see the future of liminal cage and hope to play it once it releases!
Hey, loved the video and I instantly realized it was inspired by P3, but I also noticed that the running and walking animations are missing their ups and downs, Basically the start of the walking/running cycle is when the character have their knees unfolded, but as they walk near the middle of the cycle their knees fold and their body goes down with it, if you add that to animations you will noticed how much more alive they are, you can even customize it a little to convey personality, there are a bunch of videos explaining running cycles so I hope this helps.
I love when games r made with older visuals and modern mechanics. There's so many quality of life improvements that can make old games even more amazing.
Thanks again for sharing your dev history! The character/monster design look great. Best of luck to you and your dev team I’m sure the final product will be amazing!
so cool! i want to make my own jrpg as well, but always told myself i wasnt ready or didnt have the skills yet (i dont have the programming side, just art). and you always hear that advice of "make your first game simple," so i was intending to work on a different idea for my first. but i just cant get my original jrpg game out of my head! it lives in my head rent free because i really love it. i still "work" on it, but dont have a demo or anything really, because ive told myself im not ready yet. but here you are, going full steam ahead on your idea! granted, you have more dev skills than i do, but its showing me i straight up have no more excuses getting started lmao.
Oh hell yeah. Earlier this year, I wanted to do exactly this and make a game in Unreal with PS2 graphics, but I couldn't find any good resources on how to do it, and quickly gave up. I didn't really know what to look for outside of that one video on RU-vid of that guy talking about his horror game project, and it was rough. Especially because I felt like an idiot asking anyone for help. This is a really nice place to start, if I ever want to pick that project up again.
I just watched the video and OMG this looks pretty awesomeee! I know that the inspiration is from persona but it just really reminds me of one of my favourite games on the psp Fate/Extra, even the games logo kinda looks like the Fate/ExtraCCC game logo! I am very hyped to see where this project goes, you guys are cooking good!
Greetings! RU-vid suggest your video and I glad that it do! I'm a beginner GameDev and my goal it's do game with visual/graphics of PlayStation 2 era... There is a lot tutorials to make a "Low Poly" PlayStation 1 or even N64 stuff, but not so much about the "Not so Low and not so High Poly" of PlayStation. YOU SAVED ME! Now I know what I need to do with my models to look like something will put on DVD
"you shouldn't make a jrpg as your first game but someone's gotta do it" I feel that brother... I decided to make mine nonlinear too. Almost a decade in the making... Almost done. Best of luck to your project as well!
I like seeing technical devlogs that show how it's done like this, while also talking about the game itself. It looks like it's going to be sick and a more sinister take on some of the Persona series ideas, I'll be keeping up to see the progress
we're definitely going for more of a horror angle than Persona. A lot of the similarities between LC and Persona are almost exclusively in the visual style. thanks for watching!
I just came across your channel over on twitter by chance and I'm so glad I did, I absolutely love videos like this, watching you work through the process of making a rpg gets me so inspired to start making a game of my own at some point. Keep up the great work I just hope the next devlog is quicker than 6 months because I am invested :D
happy to see somebody i've been following on twitter on my recommended :o thanks for the peek at your process. it's reassuring that someone making things of this caliber is also still tinkering the same way i do :) fantastic work here, and elsewhere! ( i LOVE your tunes in They Speak)
This was a lucky find for me. I happened to be working on my first ps2-inspired model for an Air Gear character, but I was procrastinating because I got frustrated with UVs. This'll definitely be useful.
there's one video i watched that goes over UV mapping by CG Cookie that I found really helpful. I also recommend Easeam and UV Squares or ZenUV if you're using blender. Easeam has a mark by flat surface so you can mark UVs around a selected portion of an objects surface.
@@iamdemidevi Thank you so much! Which would you recommend the most? ZenUV is a bit pricey, but I would be willing to go for it if it's better than the other 2 put together.
it has different uses. I caught it on sale so it wasn't too bad. Easeam id recommend over squares cuz you can achieve it in a more janky way (select quad, align its vertices horizontal and vertical till its a straight rectangle, select your other quads while its selected and then hit Follow Active Quads, and itll make all the other follow the same quad size. Easeam also has a better unwrap algorithm than base blender
If you manage to accurately recreate ps2 ambiance without clogging it with too many “modern” “filters” that will be extremely impressive. I’m really hyped and looking forward to this.
great video!! I'll be following your project for sure, you have a great future ahead of you. loved the char designs, loved the modeling... this made me want to start developing my stuff too haha keep it up!!
Hey, guys! I loved your video 😁 As a fan of Kingdom Hearts, I am rooting for the success of your game! That art style is truly amazing. I'm really curious on how, exactly, you rigged those characters. As an animation student, I have already rigged some humanoid characters, but specifically rigging low-poly models has been quite challenging to do, as the models "break" with the distortion the rig causes. Could you show your rigging method, please? Thanks in advance, and hope to see your game soon!
I use an addon called auto rig pro. It basically places bones based on points and then skins them based on a voxel heat preset. You still have to go back and do weight clean up especially with overlapping geometry but it's not too bad if the character doesn't have a lot of dangly bits like belts or skirts, hair etc. I think good topology is more important than weight painting, especially in the joints.
I think a jrpg isnt the worst genre to start for your first commercial game for me it's perfectly fine its actually nice to see a rpg devlog my own game uses ps1 graphics since I am more of a jack of all traits then a master of 1 but this is just impressive
these character models are incredibly cute. I'd love a more full look at how you go about making them. most tutorials are either low poly or too high fidelity
The work that has been displayed so far has been majorly groovy - I know I'd greatly appreciate seeing small screencaps & shorts of **any** production material in the community tab, especially if making proper devlogs ever becomes too daunting. Either way, don't torture yourselves, and keep up the great work!
that's a great idea! I have been looking at doing shorts with the team but with multiple people its a bit more of a task to figure out whose doing what
@@iamdemidevi Ahh, I can see how that'd be a bit of a chore, haha. Honestly, you could really cut out that middleman as long as your coworkers send you random progress updates unprompted, right? I can see it now - Nothing scarier than receiving a .blend file in the middle of the night with: a massive model clipping the bounds + unapplied scale & rotation + inverted normals + stretched textures + looping UVs + 200 unmerged vertices + rendering in cycles w/ too many light paths... The horror!
Cool devlog! Really love the style and aesthetic! I also appreciate you sharing a lot of your techniques! For Playstation controller support... I believe you can use the RawInput plugin for Unreal Engine to get it working. I haven't bothered to try it myself, but I seem to recall that's what people recommend. Besides that, a more technical (and C++ heavy) method is implementing Steam's API into your game itself. How do you handle exporting the environment textures? Are you just baking the entire scene to a single texture? And out of curiosity, have you tried composing the environments in UE and baking it in-engine using static lighting? If so, how did it compare?
