As the Bushido team near the end of our first development sprint (ready for Rezzed) we look at what it takes to build a believable and authentic Samurai world...

Posted by sam.ibbitson on Mar 26th, 2014

We've been a bit slack on the blog posts again... sorry! As always it's never through a lack of content to show off- we've just been super busy. That aside, I'm happy to announce two major milestones have been reached!

The first: Our unique Combat Mechanic! We've taken a really long time working on our mechanic as to ensure that its innovative, rich and solidly grounded in its authenticity. We've approached a number of experts in the field of Japanese swordsmanship and are now working with an organisation in the UK (Somerset Budokai: Fredeast.org.uk) to ensure that we strike a balance between playability and authenticity.

We're not quite ready to show off any gameplay of the mechanic just yet, as we've had to scrap some of our older animations and re-create them based on video footage we captured of the Somerset Budokai students. We're making/implementing these animations as I type, so it won't be long until we have something ‘full-featured' to show off.

The next milestone is: Our first complete environment!



An in-engine screenshot from our Kamioka Castle scene

As anyone with an appreciation of Japanese culture will know- everything the Japanese do has some form of ritual. Everything is a craft; from weapon smiths to architects, carpenters or textile workers... even the most basic trade has its traditions. This is, to some degree, why everything takes so bloody long to emulate in 3D for a game!! Researching, designing and building our environments has been made a little easier by virtue of the fact that we're re-creating REAL historical sites. Plenty of photos exist of Japan's many castles, and in some instances you can walk around them as if you were really there using Google Maps (Nagoya Castle: LINK).

For our first full environment, we've decided to focus on a Kamioka castle (a small fort built in 1564). One of the main challenges from an indie artists point of view is to create assets which can be easily reused. As such, pretty much every element in our map has been designed so that they are modular and can be reused to build different/bigger castles or fortresses.

We're going to focus on showing off the castle itself for now, as we want to show off the whole environment in a later post (a video which also shows how combat works).



The castle utilizes some of the Marmoset Skyshop Shaders

From Friday we'll be at Rezzed- a big UK Indie/PC/Console gaming event! If anyone reading this is going to be there, hit us up on twitter!

Cheers,

Sam