For a brief time, Parabellum was giong to feature Second World war vehicles. Depicted above, the player and enemy vehicles were the M4 Sherman and the Panzer III respectively. I quickly decided against this, as most if not all of the well known tank games focus on realistic depictions of actual vehicles. I wanted to do something different; maybe it’s the artist in me that just itches to create new things.The first custom, fictional tank designed for Parabellum. called the “Cougar”. Largely based off the M4 Sherman, M18 Hellcat, and T-34 medium tanks from the Second World War.Exploring customisation elements for the vehicle, to personalise it and make it feel more “lived in”.I hadn’t quite settled on a visual style for the game at this point (haven’t at time of writing, either, in all honesty). I experimented with a more graphic novel styled rendering style, to try and steer clear of photorealism. Photorealism is the go-to visual style, and it requires a considerable amount of time and effort. For a small homebrew game, it seemed like a death sentence to commit to that whilst unable to commit full-time to the project.I got a little distracted at this point in the project; and began buiding an environment in addition to the vehicle and enemy turret. I had an interesting workflow figured out, though. I created a template in World Machine that could be altered to create variations of a biome’s terrain, and could then take that and plug it into Unity’s terrain system to create new terrain very quickly. Coupled with a system I picked up on the store, I could populate the terrain with textures, props and foliage based on a ruleset — all procedural. In other words, I could create a new empty map in minutes. It was pretty cool, and I’m still planning on using it.Inside the commander’s cupola. At a point in the project, I decided that going for a first person perspective instead of a third person perspective would help the game differenciate itself, and help make it more immersive.
Parabellum 