Designed for destruction

Posted by Tom, 2009-04-08 Permalink Latest posts List of all posts

The game I'm working on requires a large number of unique buildings. With the graphical style I've chosen this poses a problem - how do you build hundreds of houses in a reasonable amount of time?

What makes it even harder is that those houses are going to be destroyed in the course of the game so they cannot be just simple photographs. I need to be able to take them apart, break windows, add cracks and have plaster and other bits fall off. I can't just overlay stuff like that over a photo.

First I thought about randomly generating buildings in code but it turned out it would be a pretty dangerous thing. I don't want any of the signs of destruction to show up in the wrong places or have a wrong combination of colors ruin the looks of it so I will rather place everything by hand.

So I've created some editing tools that allow me to create "templates" for various sizes of buildings and add decorations to them to make them each look unique. I can build a basic house with windows and doors and a roof and then I can create a dozen variations of it by changing the color tone of the facade, rearranging some elements, adding graffiti, putting antennae on the roof etc.



I've tested building a few houses and putting them in the game and it works very well. You could call the graphical style photorealistic but it looks much more vibrant and plastic than a photo. It is actually built from small fragments of real photographs but only after they've been heavily photoshopped. I really love the way it turned out.



Right now I'm at the phase of preparing the different elements in large numbers so I can "manufacture" the required number of buildings in the editor.