Week 21 - Off the Map week 3

This week was focussing on getting a basic whitebox going; I literally built this up out of the basic shapes used in Unreal engine 4. I wanted it to be incredibly basic and just show the basic route to see if it worked, we soon realised that it was quite important to not go in one direction in a sidescroller and if you did you really needed lots of verticality. So I played with the route for a bit, it was quite long and had lots of sections but I soon got rid of some of them and its fairly modular so we could probably cut more if we feel like we need it. I also talked to the other members of my team and set a similar task to a couple of them with the other levels we had talked about.

I also started work on our Alice design, I aim to keep it grounded in late 18^th century clothing designs. I started the same way as my usual character projects, I doodled in my sketchbook, really roughly just to get some ideas out on paper. I then went on to think about finding some reference for the clothing, to do so I went on to pinterest and tried to find clothing of the time period. I also looked at other design work focussing on the same era.

 This week has probably been the slowest of the project so far, we have lots to do but no real art direction at the moment. Over the coming weekend I will try to figure this out, we need to get a move on with this project and a rough impression of our visuals in to the white box. I also need to make some seriously big leaps and bounds with this Alice design,  id like to be modelling very soon so I will focus on this next week.

Week 20 - Off the Map week 2

This week was another week spent really getting to grips with engine jargon, I feel like I am getting there with the blueprints and have put some basic stuff together using online tutorials etc. I have managed to get a simple camera swap working, whilst we dropped the idea quite fast I managed to get it to change to first person and back to sidescroller. We dropped the idea early on as we felt it was a cool concept but would be difficult to execute and to justify. Instead we opted for switching the camera at a specific point and only swapping back at the end of the game. This would be done via cutscene.

At this point a lot of our team had decided what they really wanted to get out of this project, for some bizarre reason our team contains three character artists so we need three characters. I wanted to do Alice for certain; we needed a rabbit and decided to use the caterpillar towards the end. Although we aren’t so certain on how the end is going to pan out at the moment, the plan is to start at the canal, you see the rabbit follow it to the rabbit hole. Fall down said rabbit hole and enter a cave sequence followed by a size shrinking puzzle. This is then followed by a forrest level, which features lots of platforming puzzles ( timing based etc.)

Something else I tried to figure out this week was the implementation of a checkpoint system. You think that this would be a standard thing in unreal engine as its in almost every game. At least it will be a simple blueprint right? WRONG its possibly the most complicated thing ever. Such a lengthy process fo such little reward is almost insulting, even when I got it working; sort of. It wouldn’t work properly as the blueprint I used as reference was out of date. I started thinking about ways around this, would it be easier to approach it a different way? In the end I decided to create each respawn individually, as there is only a handful. To do I created a killvolume that when entered it teleports you back to a designated point in the level.

Week 19 - Off the map week 1

Off the map is here, already, I can't quite believe it. I remember hearing lots about it when I was a first year scrub, I saw the work the now third years produced and seriously questioned if I could ever produce something to such a high standard. Now I'm here though I guess I feel quite a bit more confident especially in regards to teamwork etc.

The off the map project is a yearly competition held by the British library, in conjuncture with game city. This is the first where crytek arent involved which means we aren't actually limited to using cry engine. This was good news and bad, it's good because as a year we have become quite proficient in unreal 4 but it would of been quite nice to try out one of the other major players when it comes to engine. This week definitely started out quite interesting, we were assigned groups based upon who we had worked with in the past and how we worked together. Also for the DMU project hand in we were given the limitation of the level being a 2D side scroller, this was a controversial topic for a lot of people. A lot of people had already started planning there projects previously and some had a lot of problems working with certain members of the their teams in the previous project, many spoke out against this however I was raring to go. The sound of a side scroller sounded a little bizarre at first, i can see it being quite simple in execution but possibly limiting too; as time passed and I realised what we could achieve with a side scroller I got quite attached to it.

After  lots of complaints from various people on the course, the tutors finally caved and allowed you to choose what type of project you would like to do. At this point, as a group, we actually got quite attached to the idea of doing a side scroller. We had plenty of team meetings and started to plan what we wanted to do as a group. As it was the first week we kept it simple.

One of the main team discussions of the week was about the style of the project, do we go stylized or go for something quite realistic. We also actually found that the majority of the group were actually characters artists, which was quite bizarre; maybe a mistake on the tutors behalf? Who knows. Either way it's still a little up in the air at the moment we aren't going out of our way to make a decision yet. One thing is for certain, I'm certain we will aim high for this project, we are in fact aiming to win the project so, morale is high and I'm trying to keep the moment I built during the last project going.

Week 18 - container city final

The container city project has been the most interesting one yet, I have really enjoyed the past few weeks and I feel I have helped create something we can all be proud of. As stated in the few posts prior to this one, 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 sci-fi. For this project I worked with Emily Kelly, Anastasia Wyatt and Thomas Kavanagh; all of which were a dream to work with and i would happily work with any of them again.

For this project the main things I did was the engine side of things which were quite basic, I also designed the shipping container for our level, we went for a sci-fi theme so felt that designing our own container was incredibly important to the success of the level. So I decided to design the container to be very modular, so we could create lots of variation throughout what was essentially the same corridor pieces and structure. To do so I made individual surfaces interchangeable such as walls, ceiling pieces and connectors, this whilst simple in design was not so simple to pull of when modelling. Getting the pieces to slot together properly was incredibly frustrating, especially if you wanted to edit something and then reimport it back in to engine. The other many issue I had to over come was actually the technical side of things, i really underestimated the technical side of things, this being a game art course I wasn't really expecting my peers to pull out as many stops as they did with it. I managed to get a few basics working but required a fair bit of input from my fellow classmates to get the more complicated stuff working, stuff such as the key pick up system and multiple locked doors.

As well as this project went, there were a few hiccups along the way, timing was an issue and some texturing was left to the last minute because of poor planning. Another issue was the ending, we didn't leave quite enough time to polish the finale, meaning it was a little lack lustre and didn't quite match the concepts, to combat this we should have planned more time to polish the whole thing. The main focus in the end was getting the game to be functional, which should of been done sooner so this was completely my fault and will try to avoid this in future.

During the next project, i aim to focus more on my texturing as this has been a project where I really ran out of time to perfect and learn anything. I did however learn a considerable amount about making modular parts for a game level and how you can really push this method to make entire game worlds. I am also really looking forward to spending some time time developing a character during the next project if I get the opportunity, characters are something I have really developed a passion for and I am looking forward to learning some new processes to add to my tool kit. In conclusion this project was a huge success given the time frame, much like any group project it had its issues but i feel we overcame them by prioritising the things we had left.