Legends of Firestorm! A hack and slash MMO

Hi everyone!

I'd like to introduce my new game, Legends of Firestorm, it's an action MMO with support for hundreds of players and thousands of monsters in a giant open world.

We're a two man dev team, I've been responsible for the art and my friend Peter Nicholls for the code.

Although there's lots of work left to do Legends of Firestorm is finally at the stage we can show it off, and we've also launched a kickstarter here : Legends of Firestorm Kickstarter

Please take a look and let us know what you think! Here are some screenshots;













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Whoooaaah, this is looking amazing, guys! Really great art.
Same for the gameplay and other game interaction. Looking really polished! I like the effect when players are behind an object.
I hope you get this game funded, guys! Looks like Pro work to me.

Keep it up!

 

Thanks Chris! I'm really glad you like it, if there's anything you particularly want to see or know about please let us know and we'll see what we can do!

 

The game looks solid, but you guys have to do more advertisement.
Forums, game sites, youtube let\'s play channels etc. Often updates in kickstarter are needed as well to keep the community engaged.

I wish you best of luck !

 

The game looks good, but something is missing on the game, I think it's shadows, the characters don't look like they belong to the scene. If you fix that, the graphics would look awsome! Still looks great guys, keep it up!

 

Primus88, Yeah, trying to sort all that out now but wow, takes longer than I thought it would!

Rafael, We can't afford pro, so no shadows at the moment, hopefully we will get time to try with the new ones in 4.2 soon and see how that looks or upgrade to pro when the kickstarters finished.

Thanks both for the kind words, it's great to finally start showing people!

 

Do you want some help in item and inventory system, this inventory doesnt look good

 

Backed, looks really nice. I like the sense of scale you guys have as well as the camera perspective you chose. I am trying to work on building a isometric view system, hopefully you don't mind me taking notes on yours? Looking forward to watching this progress and I wish you guys the best of luck with your kickstarter! Looking great!

-Dane

 

Liviu : We've deliberately left the icons rough as felt it was one of the few things we could outsource to speed up production if our Kickstarter made enough money! The icons were actually from the unity asset store, nice set but don't quite fit our look or have a wide enough range. I like your game on IndieDB btw, I was checking out the swords a few weeks ago when you hit 5k views.

DancC020: That's fantastic!! Yes of course it's fine to take notes on ours, in fact feel free to ask any questions and we'll try and help as much as we can.

 

Look really nice! I really like the art style.

 

Maybe it's just me but is that the final title of the game?
The name seems clumsy to me.

Looks good but an MMO with no orcs? That's just weird

 

I agree, game looks promising but title seems like a random combination of words.

 

Wow everything looks really awesome. I'm not sure about the characters though, could use some improvements. Also if you really want to wow some people make some badass armor sets and weapons Would draw more people to donate. Other than that the environments and combat look great!

 

Hey I'm Pete (the coder on legends of firestorm)

Thanks everyone for the positive feedback!

Killswitch / Cheburek: The name has been something of a hot topic, we settled on Firestorm as the name of our world since we felt it gave some interesting aesthetic directions to explore in the future. (such as cratered or scorched areas we need to experiment and see what looks good and plays well )

jessee03: We'll definitely put some high res renders of our armor sculpts soon. We could possibly get a couple of cool weapons done as well over the coming week and put up some images I'll discuss that with Frankie in the morning. Thanks for the ideas!

 

Why not just Firestorm then? It's 'Legends of' that makes it sort of clumsy.
Doesn't roll off the tongue.

 

I would probably just go with Firestorm also. That said, I don't think that a project's name matters as much as some people think it does. After you've heard it a couple times almost any name sounds normal. I doubt I've ever failed to buy an interesting game because it had a poor name, or purchased an uninteresting one because it had a great one.

 

I'd somewhat agree that Firestorm might have been a preferable name, however due to the number of other things called "Firestorm" we wanted something to make it easier to search for information about our game. Also probably an obvious point but we aren't really in a situation where changing the name is viable at the moment We might consider it at some point in the future depending how things go with our kickstarter campaign!

 

I thought you might like to see some of the art process behind making one of the monsters, the Pig Boss, hes going to be one of the first really nasty guys you encounter.

Here’s three of them surrounding my player. Okay so, early on we decided to go for fully normal mapped characters because we knew we wanted a full time of day and weather system meaning the assets will have to react nicely to the lighting changes.

This model was done with Blenders dynamic topology function, I found it amazingly useful, cutting hours or even days off the time it takes to make these sculpts as well as keeping the whole process less technical and more creative and resulting in interesting models. I’ve dug out the history of this model sculpts so we can see how it progressed, older versions on the left to newer on the right.

Every step here is where I tested in game, I’m the only artist making all the assets for a MMO so trying to waste as little time as possible is vital! At every step I loaded the high poly model directly in game to review and then work out what I needed to do make it look good from our view and that I didn’t head in a direction that was unsuitable for our game. It also stopped me from adding unnecessary details hence why the sculpts look a little bit loose in some places, at this point I was getting to one polygon per pixel in our game view so any more detail would be unnecessary. As a nice side effect I felt like it let me explore a lot more interesting shapes, before I had always felt constrained by overworking one area then not wanting to make drastic changes and loose work, I can’t stress enough how good dynamic topology was for this kind of work.

This is one of the test scenes I was working from, on the big pig the shapes are smooth, the lines are sharp and his silhouette is different enough from his smaller friends so it’s close to being good enough. Probably 2 steps from the end I decimated the mesh, baked a normal map and threw it on a rig so I could test out key poses and articulation. With previous monsters I found that it may have looked good in a static pose but couldn’t move and achieve the range of motion and require extensive rework, another possible time waster.

This is the model rigged and animation begun, using rigify the blender add-on has been a huge timesaver, quick to test, easily adjustable and standardized between files so I can copy animations between models if needed. At this stage I’ve probably thrown a quick texture in game but really I’m still deciding if the model is good enough to call final, it’s quick to change proportions and rebake but not so easy to quickly adjust textures to match uv changes.

next post with more images below

 

This is more or less the final guy now. As our game camera is fixed it lets me take a lot of shortcuts that most people wouldn’t dream of, the low-poly model is basically just the high-poly decimated model, I fix errors, turn edges and add supporting geometry when I see the problems arise in animation or game. I’ve actually found that decimating does a better job than I would do by hand, especially in keeping the silhouette looking smooth and shapes natural and in a fraction of the time. The UVs are also very rough, it’s a quick seam, pin and relax; I don’t have time to become obsessive about them and on the few cases I have tried to improve them there’s been no visible benefit in game. I author at 1024×1024 and downsize in Unity3ds texture setting, in most cases the model is not on the mip boundary so the texels density is already higher than it needs to be, if it is on the boundary and it makes a difference I just up the texture res and take the memory hit. Just as an example the pigs using a 256*256 dxt5 and 256*256 dxtnm textures taking up a total of 170KB, not something I need to spent worrying about.

That’s pretty much it!

If you enjoyed reading please check out our Kickstarter!!

 

If you want shadows, try blob shadows underneath the character. Faster than rt shadows and available in Free.

 

We'll give it a proper assessment when we get pro or try the new shadows in 4.2. I've put blobs under some of the monsters like you can see in the first shot but I'm not always convinced it looks better than nothing.

 

How long did it take you to do the pig boss?

 

Probably 2 or 3 days, that said it's not finished yet. The animations need a lot of work because to make sure its fun to play against and there will probably be some kit variations so we can reuse him without it getting boring.