World Design & 3D

Dom Gibson

Developer

Wassap!

Hello, welcome back to the blog. I am writing to inform you of the progress I am making and taking some downtime to write and create these blogs. I find it useful writing down what I am achieving and also helps to problem solve. Its weird and wonderful.

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Godot & Blender

As mentioned prior to development and also in the last post, I am making a game in Godot 4.4 called DIRTY SLOT. A scary, nightmarish game that simulates Roulette and casino logic. I am very new to game development and I dont want to make this the last thing I do.

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Lets discuss 3D modelling, my background and what I am able to achieve at this point.

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In Godot, I have been able to work on and off with some 3D models. I am proud of the Chips I have developed and designed. I usually take images from the web and look at their design, incorporate some of the texturing and just rework the asset to suit the need for the game. I will show you an example.

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These are 3 chips I have designed in the game. These are currently setup for the roulette table. When a player hits their 'NumberKey1' key, the denomination is 5 chips. 'NumberKey2' is 10 and 'NumberKey3' is 20.

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These chips were designed in Godot especially. I wanted to make a scene, create the cylinder - which became the chip - and then use that scene and reference it where and when. I am unsure of any other methods to get this to work... and it does the job well. Each texture was just an Albedo texture. Then using the UV1 tool, I was able to scale it to the correct size and it fit perfectly with the chip. I then added 2 extra cylinders to make a sort of border. Now, I would have loved to make the borders better to be striped with colour, however it stumped me with my knowledge at the time. I could definately do this in Blender, but wanted a quick, easy and viable solution for the time being. I might return to this later.

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If there any other methods you would like me to explore or a better way to do this, please get in contact with your thoughts using the websites form.

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Test ENV & Slot Machine

Again... as mentioned before, this is something I am proud of, in terms of functionality. I wanted to design a rustic, Cloverpit inspired slot machine. This is untextured apart from metal Albedo I had lying around. I want it to imitate more of a slot machine and will definately return to this sooner to experiment with.

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There are a few things going on in this test environment. I want to address all the components in this scene.

Player Capsule
Slot Machine + additional logic
2D Sprites
Markers (x3 in background)
Lighting
Room

Player Capsule

The player has its own interation logic under a Godot (.gd) script which allows the player, the camera to all rotate, move in time and also be able to interact with objects in the scene. Everything is highlighted for debugging, its the best way to look into functionality, collisions and sizing/scale of certain features.

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Slot Machine + Logic

Slot machine has been mentioned. Again, proud but not entirely. I want to be able to make it more realistic. It does offer that nice, simple nature but its not fundamentally viable for the game. It looks alright, but it can be better. Like... glass for example. I want to work on this. Even making it digitalised.

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What do I mean by digitalised? - For example, I want to look at having a simulated screen where the numbers come down, just like an IGT or a Bally slot machine. Especially with the handle, it could combine both worlds together. Modern and retro. I have not seen too many guides on if this is possible but I might pair up with some AI to help design and come up with a solution. I did see a YouTube guide for making an interactable CRT style Monitor where you can walk up to it and click different tabs which might in fact lead me down an ideal path to solving this.

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You might notice faintly a huge sphere mesh surrounding the slot machine. This is infact surrounding the handle. You can also see a highlight for the handle. The idea for this is to look at interactables within the game. When the Player walks up to the machine, they can hit the 'E' key to interact with the handle. The best part, I was able to get AI to generate me a beautiful animation to simulate a spring loaded action arm. This turned out amazingly.

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extends Node3D

@onready var handle_joint: Node3D = $handle_joint
@onready var interaction_zone: Area3D = $"../InteractionZone"
@onready var handle_bar_outline: MeshInstance3D = $handle_joint/handle_bar_outline
@onready var handle_ball_outline: MeshInstance3D = $handle_joint/handle_ball_outline

var is_pulled := false
var is_player_near := false

signal handle_pulled

func _ready():
	set_process_input(true)
	_set_outline_visible(false)

	interaction_zone.body_entered.connect(_on_body_entered)
	interaction_zone.body_exited.connect(_on_body_exited)

func _input(event):
	if event.is_action_pressed("interact") and is_player_near and not is_pulled:
		pull_handle()

func pull_handle():
	is_pulled = true

	var tween := create_tween()
	tween.set_trans(Tween.TRANS_ELASTIC)
	tween.set_ease(Tween.EASE_OUT)
	tween.tween_property(handle_joint, "rotation_degrees:x", 70.0, 0.4)
	tween.tween_interval(0.15)
	tween.set_trans(Tween.TRANS_BACK)
	tween.set_ease(Tween.EASE_OUT)
	tween.tween_property(handle_joint, "rotation_degrees:x", 12.0, 0.5)
	tween.finished.connect(_on_tween_done)

func _on_tween_done():
	is_pulled = false
	handle_pulled.emit()

func _on_body_entered(body: Node):
	if body.is_in_group("player"):
		is_player_near = true
		_set_outline_visible(true)

func _on_body_exited(body: Node):
	if body.is_in_group("player"):
		is_player_near = false
		_set_outline_visible(false)

func _set_outline_visible(visible: bool) -> void:
	if handle_bar_outline:
		handle_bar_outline.visible = visible
	if handle_ball_outline:
		handle_ball_outline.visible = visible

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This logic above is everything for the handle. pull_handle() is the main function where I set the degrees in rotation for the axis. being 'x'. This will then use tween and have an elastic with a curve in the time and rotation. With the 0.15 interval in between to imitate holding it down for a short period, then shoots back up to its resting angle. I love this, feel free to use this.

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2D Sprites

You have seen these mentioned before. These were images generated with AI and then taken into a pixel art generation to scale the images down significantly. Then with a little bit of Photoshop, I was able to move a couple parts of the image to animate frame by frame. I went on another website that allowed me to make a spritesheet, exported that into Godot and was able to divide the sheet into frames. Then hitting autoplay, enabling billboard to follow on a locked axis (I think Y Axis in this case) so the billboards always face the player. These were setup on a Node3D and an AnimatedSprite3D too. I got these to increase tension within the game. Looks amazing. I love billboards.

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Markers

The markers, the 3 giant cube (things) in the background. These are for a functionality I am trying to replicate from an online casino game called Lightning Roulette. These markers will drop down and have a multiplier on set numbers on the table. These will be random selected via a math.random (or Godot alternative). These will ahve set multipliers like x50, x100, x250, 500 etc. These are not decided and have yet to be implemented but something to test and work on

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Lighting

The lighting is due to be more dramatic. In the actual games scene, it is set to shake and flash with the screen to imitate impending doom. I like this. I want to incorporate more scenery, get more comfortable with lighting and the environment settings to replicate what I have in my head. Same will go for the slot machine if incorporated. I will want to have set lighting for the Jackpots, Big Wins, You Win, You Lose. Differentiating between each with mood lighting. Again, needs to be more stressful for the player.

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Room

I want more scenery to collapse on the unrealistic, surreal nightmare look. Buckshot Roulette does this perfectly and merges its look into how the game feels. Adding more scenery, scenes and also being able to make the most out of what the engine can be capable of whilst keeping it optimized. I am not going to be making Battlefield 6 anytime soon, however, scenery sets tone. Thats what I need to acomplish.

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Great Resources!

Godot Cafe - https://discord.com/invite/zH7NUgz

A great place to learn, find more resources and get expert help from the Godot community.

Godot Shaders - https://godotshaders.com/

Amazing place for shaders, learning about different styles and how to implement them.

Godot Engine Demo Projects - https://github.com/godotengine/godot-demo-projects

A brilliant place to steal and grab some inspiration from to help build your dreams!

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Welp... thats the end of this blog. Stay tuned for more. I will go over new features and bug reports. If you have any tips or guidance for the project, drop me an email using the form.

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