Week 25 - Off the map Week 7

Week 7 was another slow week, I am not entirely sure much was achieved between the team; just general asset creation was the main focus. I baked and started texturing Alice, I am a little worried about Alice at the moment, I don’t have much input from team mates as it is something I have never really done in labs as it is more of a free time thing at the moment with all this engine stuff. There is still a daunting amount of engine stuff left to do so that is also really hindering me from doing Alice.

We showed our level to Emma again this week, only briefly and we were advised to trim the fat a little more around the forest area. At this point we really streamlined the level and it flowed a lot better and just focussed on the best bits. We also got the rabbit running away from you in engine which was really impressive to see, it meant we could make parts of the cave completely functional. Right now I am just planning for the holidays I have spoken to my team, explained the situation I should hopefully have most of the finished meshes left for me on K drive at this point to get in engine then textures after Easter.

For me over Easter I am really going to get it playing a little more like we intend it to be, with matinees and the camera panning around as you do certain things. Another thing I plan to go to town on is cut scenes and transitioning between each level is quite janky at the moment, as a stretch goal I plan to implement a menu and loading screens.

Week 24 - Off the map Week 6

This week started with showing the current state of the project to Emma our personal tutor, during the presentation she helped us to realise that the levels we were producing were just too big and would need to be drastically cut down. At first we thought that maybe dropping the cave level would be the right choice here, however we felt that the cave had an equal share and offered lots of contrast to the other two very similar areas. We then just decided to get people to play through our levels and decide what bits people found boring. Once we had done this, we cut parts out of the level and tweaked the layout a little so it was fairly seamless. I really feel that this has benefitted us as a lot of the previously seen areas weren’t very interesting we took the small handful of areas we liked and combined them in to one; cutting the level down to a third.

This also made me realise that I would need to really work on the forest level, at this point our cave level was looking quite populated and even contained some finished assets, and they were sparce but still there; whilst the forest was entirely whitebox. I actually used a lot of the canal assets to populate this scene, there would not be too many unique assets for this area so I soon filled the space given to me.

Something else really dawned on me too this week, we were officially half way through the project, and we have LOTS to do. At this point I started to think about our time management and how bad its been, so I created massive to do list with all the assets on it letting us know stage people are at. I am also using a website called producteev to help with my project management. Its proved useful this week but im not sure about its longevity.

Week 23 - Off the map week 5

This week a looked at our levels as a whole and decided to really go to town on the canal level as it looked and felt like the level that was getting the least attention. To do so I got all the assets that Christy had produced for this level and imported them and began to scatter them using the foliage brush. The foliage brush was awkward and just sometimes didn’t work, it gave good results in the end, it was a little dense in the field area so I may have to go back and erase some of it if we get frame rate problems.

Example of Christys Foliage

The main issue I found was the ground texture, the texture I was provided with was a fantastic tillable but we needed a mud texture for it too to really sell it and get it looking realistic. So I asked Christy to work on this. This week was also the great merging of our forest and cave level in to one unreal file. Good god it was a mess, materials and textures all over the place and meshes in every other folder, it took a while to sort through and actually broke a couple textures, most are fixed by now though.

I managed to get the Alice concept down towards the start of this week too, which means by the end of the week I could start modelling and maybe start unwrapping too. This was a load of my back as I was beginning to worry about the characters design as the group hadn’t seen a lot of my design work. The mesh is quite high poly as I was thinking of maybe using Apex cloth in Unreal engine 4.

This for me is a major stretch goal, if we are struggling for time towards the end then this will be the first thing to be cut. I also really hope to actually figure out how on earth hair alphas work in unreal engine 4.

Week 22 - Off the map week 4

This week I planned on really going to town with the Alice mesh however I found some more pressing matters within our level. Having seen where people are at in other groups a started to really block in the basics of our level. I really focused on the visuals and the layered feel of the level, I am mostly focussing on the cave level as the other members of our team are focussing on the other levels. Obviously everyone in the team has lots of input on the decisions we make and we follow the concept given to us, although our concepts are quite vague at the moment so we will really need to work on these to refine them.

I asked Christy to make me some very basic rocks to help create the walls of the cave, it didn’t have to be any detailed but it had to look remotely like a rock. Once I got this from him , I scattered it around the cave to give the illusion of cave walls. I then also started to block out the ambient lighting and also start to think about the caves lighting.

I also implemented one of the puzzles we were planning, a simple tilt puzzle where you had to get some planks in the right order and hit a lever which fills the water and raises a platform allowing you to progress. This puzzle proved awkward in terms of blueprints, to begin with I started by thinking about it to literally so I reassessed and thought about it more in a game sense. I set the basics of the blueprint up with the intention of later covering it with matinees. The puzzles is currently functional and allows you to play through the rest of level from here I will figure out the rest of the mechanics for the level although its getting quite lengthy at this point and I may cut it down in the coming weeks.