I spent a lot of time in Blender this week working on the AutoTerrain system and trying to build a fortress. The terrain itself is shaping up nicely and feels pretty organic, especially close up, but I keep running into the problem that when you zoom out, it looks too cartoonish. I’m debating whether adding more detail to the cliffs would help fix that or if it would just complicate things without much payoff. I also played around with water ripple effects around cliffs, rocks, and beaches using Blender’s shader editor and geometry nodes, which added some nice environmental polish.

Modeling buildings in Blender has been a real struggle. It feels like it’s slowing me down, and I’m starting to think I might limit Blender’s role mostly to terrain and environment work. For buildings, I’m considering exporting the terrain and either drawing the buildings over it or creating rough shapes in Blender that I can trace manually later. I haven’t settled on the best way to build the fortress yet, especially since I want the interior views to work well, which adds another layer of complexity.

On the character side, I experimented with some masked, cloaked designs and started questioning whether the romance angle in the character interactions is worth keeping. I’m leaning toward dropping it, but I haven’t made a final call. I’m also thinking about making the characters more stylized to fit the world’s theme better, but that might mean overhauling the environment to match, which could be a big job.

Overall, I’m trying to figure out how to balance the stylized look across terrain, buildings, and characters without bogging down progress or having to redo too much. I’m still unsure how to improve my 3D modeling skills for structures without it becoming a bottleneck. There are a few open questions I need to resolve soon—like whether to add more cliff detail, how to handle fortress interiors, and the direction for character design and interactions. For now, the AutoTerrain system feels like it’s moving in the right direction, and I’m focusing on finding a workflow that lets me push forward without getting stuck on building models.

Two-Line Takeaway

Key step forward

The most important forward progress step is the development of the AutoTerrain system, which is shaping up nicely and feels organic, especially up close.

Significant barrier or risk

The most important barrier or risk is the struggle with 3D modeling buildings, which is slowing down progress and creating uncertainty about the best workflow for fortress construction and character design.

Generated with Nucleate by Watchlight Studio — distilled from full transcription.