Lots of work today, a full day working on new textures for Taskforce. Even without the geometry changes (which would be really awkward to make, I'd prefer to avoid them!) it seems I can improve the graphics a lot with textures. Here is a before and after shot, showing the old 2004 textures and the ones I've designed today:
The heroes tend to all look like Wolverine, but that's not a bad look for an action game! Here is one of the new Terror Troops:
One thing I have spent time on today is programming a new object viewer, so that I can see what the results are easily. One reason why the old graphics were so imperfect is that I could only ever see the objects in the game itself, so that means not from every angle and range... this, at least, helps enormously. Of course, one big reason is that I was not a visual artist at all at the time I made Taskforce.
These changes are meticulous. I will need to very slowly update every texture and character in the game. There aren't many characters. I scaled things down a lot... there were originally three Terror Troops, rather than two, and a female Zombie too, but those things didn't really add anything to the game. I should finish this process tomorrow. I also need a LOT of box art and promotional graphics, it's something I hardly paid any attention to back then. My idea was to deliberately use in-game images to give it a very digital angular look. I still thought this was a good idea, but it seems that people didn't really get it.
