Sunday, May 14, 2017

Eyes on the prize...


I've been working hard on my historical bathroom simulator The Tearoom, and I'm desperately trying to finish it within the next couple weeks. Basically, I've been doing lots of art passing and tuning. I've added the two last characters, for a total of 4 possible dude archetypes to encounter in the bathroom. I also have 2/8 possible dicks implemented, I still need to add 6 more, but at least I have the workflow and functionality figured out. In the meantime, please appreciate all the care and detail going into modeling the bathroom stalls -- and enjoy them in their clean pristine state, before I dirty them with layers of graffiti...



It was difficult to find decent bathroom stall reference photos. The game is set in 1962, so I need bathroom fixtures that look somewhat old. Unfortunately in Brooklyn / New York City, making your bathroom look like it came out of the 1920s / 1940s is very trendy right now. So not only do my fixtures need to look old, they also need to look somewhat cheap and utilitarian. The photos above represent some of the references I settled on: I wanted some of the old cheap institutional feeling of the stalls in the first photo, while feeling like the antique bathroom tech in the second photo (a Victorian era public bathroom in Toronto)... and then for some of the specifics of construction and parts, I used the diagram in the 3rd image.


I'm also consciously being very wasteful with some of my art assets: for instance, the individual screws on the panel brackets are beveled 20-sided cylinders, which is a preposterous waste of 3D geometry on such an "insignificant" detail -- except when the game is precisely about celebrating the bathroom as a central game space, and so it's suddenly not such a waste anymore, but rather a targeted investment. I want the player to notice the detail here, and the only way to do that is to put detail there.


Anyway, wish me luck, and more likely than not I still won't be finished by the end of May and I'll still have to delay the game's release, but at least I'll be closer...