Red Dead ReDADemption

Worked on the night sky, fog systems, and the horse.
The moon turned out beautiful first try basically - soft glow, real shadows on the terrain, stars scattered everywhere. That part just worked.
The deer needed a fix - turns out the model I grabbed only had ONE animation in the whole file, no walk cycle at all, so they’d just slide around like ghosts. Swapped the model, fixed how spread out they get, now they actually wander around like real animals instead of clumping into one weird deer blob.
Then the horse. Got it riding, got a cowboy sitting in the saddle, mount/dismount working… and then spent what felt like forever convinced I had two horses glitching on top of each other. Turned out to be one misplaced node plus a camera setup I’d let get way too complicated, fighting itself every single frame. Eventually just gave up patching it and rebuilt the whole camera thing from scratch, way simpler.
Still finishing it up but it’s SO close - night valley, deer wandering around, a horse I can actually hop on and ride.

Terrain, Water system, and Grass: Sculpted and textured the mountain terrain in Terrain3D - grass, rock, and snow blending across the valley and peaks.
Built the river next. Wrote a mesh generator that traces a curve through the valley and extrudes a flowing ribbon along it. Took a handful of broken attempts before it actually generated cleanly.
Then grass. Built a scatter system that places blades across the terrain while avoiding steep slopes, the snowline, and the river itself. Fixed a transparency bug, fixed a sizing bug, and finally landed on 200,000 instances. The valley actually reads as a meadow now instead of a test scene.
The waterfall took the most work. Built it as a walk-under structure with layered falling water, billowing displacement, mist and splash particles, and spatial audio. Along the way I discovered my working files had been saving outside the actual project folder the whole time, which explained a bunch of mysterious broken paths. Ported in a proper wave shader, fixed a handful of Godot 4 syntax breaks, and got ripples, foam, and reflection all working. Also fixed a white-out bug so the water stays blue from most angles instead of blowing out to solid white when viewed head-on.
Last step was applying that same water shader to the river so everything matches. For the first time the world actually feels like a place instead of a pile of debug shapes.

I moved completely to Godot and started building my terrain. I also made (and edited open-source) models and began to import them into Godot

Decided to build a browser-based 3D game as a Father’s Day gift. The concept: a Rocky Mountain valley exploration game inspired by Red Dead Redemption 2. Player rides a horse through a mountain landscape, finds a cabin filled with family photos, reads a personal letter, watches deer scatter in a clearing. The whole thing accessible via a single link with no download, no install. Started with Three.js but relized that three.js was not gonna get me were I wanted this game to be. Switched to Godot 4.6 which has proper PBR lighting, built in particle systems, and web export. First draft of the game below