Week 17 Container city week 3

This week, has been by far the most interesting, I really got to play around with the visuals of our level. To start with I used 3ds to concept using basic shapes, I modelled small cutout sections of possible designs for the hallway of our level. I then realised that I also need to really figure out the lighting in relation to our corridors, to do so I put the simple blockouts in to unreal 4 and also created a few generic rough props like a standing light and a crate etc. I then black the scene out and added some lighting to each scene. As you can see below, I kept the lighting quite dim, I wanted to portray a quite lonely feeling in the corridors; the lack of lighting also added to the claustrophobic feeling of our containers. It is at this point we figured out that it would be quite cool that at some point the lighting would change as you progress through the level and change the mood and reveal more of the environment.

I relayed the work I had done to my team and we soon picked a design, at this point I modelled the container exterior, based upon my team mate Annie's design. I then also properly modelled the interior of the container, this took a little longer than expected as we wanted the container to be fully modular so we designed each panel to be replaceable depending on which part of the level it sat in. Here is a full break down of each part of the container system.

I then went on to put in the level completely, of course there were many props that my team were working on at the time but I will put those in next week when they are textured. For now I'm focussing in lighting and the mechanics, we settled on what to include, we will have a keycard pick up to open a door, a switch to turn the power on which then in turn opens the final room door. The blueprints for these confused me to death but luckily a friend of mine was on hand to help me out.
Whilst I was working on all this my team mates Emily and Tom worked on the individual rooms in the complex I worked with Annie on finalizing the final room, we wanted it to be quite an epic reveal but we are currently running out of time so I will really need to focus and put the hours in to this. Annie also worked on the outside of the structure too and she got that looking great with a basic building and some nice lighting and visual effects. This project is slowly coming to a close and we have quite a bit to do but I think we can pull it off.

Week 16 - Container city week 2

The second week of the project was a busy one, for me this week was full of trying out new things and mostly getting to grips with engine, along side general concepting. I generally avoided 2D concepting as it's really not my strong suit and we don't have much time for this project, so I stuck with using basic shapes in max to concept how the inside of the containers would look. To start with I made a super basic box with a hand full of angles and a connecting piece so we could get it in to engine as fast as possible, it was super important that the blackout was done as soon as possible; it's a very short project and we want to leave as much time as possible for the modelling and general aesthetics. I decided to leave this 3D concepting a little while until later in the week so we could focus more on the layout/gameplay, so I took the basic container I made previously and arranged according to the floor plan we sketched out.

 It soon became apparent that the level lacked all verticality, something we discussed a lot during idea generation. So I played around a little and found I could repeat the shape we previously had again below and create an interesting path down to and back up again. This principle soon became one of the main ideas driving our concepting; the tower shape. The only problem was, at the moment, the really interesting paths took you to the outside of the building which means we would need to fake the outside bit as we really don't have the time to design and model an environment.
To help us with this we looked at some of the example work provided by unreal, to see how they handled the buildings and scenery in the distance; we decided to come back to this once we were more sold on a final concept.

As I went through and planned the route we would take I figured out all the mechanics we would need, some were still up in the air as the route wasn't 100% but for certain we would need a ladder of some sort to get back up and also doors that open as you approach them. So I immediately started to research how to create a ladder using Ue4, this is my first real attempt at engine work so it took some real getting used to; I'm still not very sure on a lot of things but as time goes on I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. As it stands the ladder is functional but is very glitchy, it took many attempts to get it working in the first place so I don't want to touch it again for a while. I'll be sure to come back to it at a later date. For now I'll just work on the other outside section and figuring out what the containers will look like.

Week 15 - Container City week 1

The first week back after Christmas, we were given our first project for the term; the container city project.  The idea behind the project was that in groups, we would produce a level mostly made out of shipping containers.  The project would mostly focus around level design and creating a path for the player, the two themes we were given to choose from were dystopian and scifi. We were allowed to choose who we worked with; i made sure to work with people i had never worked with before to keep the group work fresh. I decided to work with people that i knew, as it was a short project i wanted to be sure i could work well with them.

Before deciding on a theme or doing any type of real design work, as a group we really thought about the journey the player would go through, this was the most important thing for us. We would plan everything around this route. From the get go we seemed pretty sure we wanted some verticality in the level so the various level designs we came up with always had multiple levels that you can revisit.  Once we had a rough plan we then moved on to the aesthetic of the level.

We started by creating moodboards on pinterest of both scifi and dystopian inspirations to help us choose which to go with, as a team we were all initially drawn towards scifi. However after we put some moodboards together and debated as a team we realised we were actually equally drawn to both; so we decided to do dystopian – science fiction.  The next major task was putting together a playable white box, to do so we needed ground plans; so i started sketching them out quite roughly and made sure my team had plenty of input. Once we had achieved this, I began to think about the mechanics we would include; i knew we would need a key system, doors that open when you get close to them and lights that turn on and off.

I happily put myself forward to do the engine stuff, along with Emily. I had some experience with engine and really felt this project would be good to really get in to the more technical side of engine work. I never really used blueprints in engine but i plan to really learn the basics and hopefully leave this project with a better understanding of how to make functioning game mechanics.

I’m quite happy about this project and i feel that as a group we could really creating something epic and visually impressive. We have a really nice mix of people in the group and we seem to cover all bases.