My Game Project

Sparkingly Immersive When I decided to add particle effects, it opened up so many possibilities. I was orignially going to make the circuit box in my game spark after using it, but then I decided to put the particle system on my extractor fan, which would be the end of the level after turning it off. The sparks instantly makes it look more threatening and adding sound effects would multiply that further. Sound Now with almost everything in place, my blueprints, all my assets, textures and particle effects. What's left? Sound?!?! This in my opinion is very important as without sound, you dont feel the responsiveness of anything you do in-game. I was quite new to adding sound but quickly found out how easy it was to learn, but how hard it is to master. I started putting ambient city sounds in my game as well as sound effects for footsteps on different materials, mainly concrete and wood. I also added a hydraulic audio file for ...

Flickering Signs I wanted my neon signs to flicker slightly, like they do in real life, so I found out a way to use the emissive channel that I exported from substance painter, and create this flickering effect. I also decided to use something similar for my lamp posts and ceiling lights for the buildings. I actually used my last years project for the health pickup, and translated that straight into this project. This just adds slightly more depth to them. Especially the signs, being a texture and not 3D as I was initially planning to do, there had to be some kind of thing to make it stand out and pop. Not only this, but the Chinese (hopefully correct) is actually appropriate for the scene, which adds to the environment and tells the player where the game is set, along with everything else that should point to it being in China too.

Substance Painter  Substance painter is a software I'm used to using, so I know how to group materials and mask, etc. This is still going to take me ages to do, considering how many assets I have built. In any case, I will robot my way through the day, doing one mesh at a time. Luckily, the two substance designer textures I have (concrete and brick), I just threw straight into the Unreal Engine. This allowed me to just add the materials directly to the meshes and that's half of the game textured already; however I noticed that some of my UVs for certain meshes were oriented wrong and I had to backtrack to Maya again, fix UVs and reimport the meshes in my project to fix the textures going the wrong way. This didn't take too long but was still a hassle to deal with. At least 1/3 of my assets had this problem. Here are some of my textured assets:  Prayer Shrine                                ...

Concrete My first and main texture will be concrete. Following a long and very informative video on YouTube I managed to create a super cool concrete texture in Substance Designer. This will be used for my ground and/or road.  After creating the concrete texture, I knew that creating more of these would be too time consuming, So I started to look for open source textures online, on the substance share page and found a nice roof tile texture with scalar parameters so that I could use them on a diverse range of materials.

Modelling and Details I have modelled quite a lot of things as you can tell from the extensive list below. Everything is UV'd. I am worried however, that I have become so absorbed in the blueprints and unreal aspect, that I have left texturing quite late. Hopefully I will have plenty of time to work hard and get everything textured nicely. I am planning on using Substance Designer for the largest textures of the game, so that would be the road and floor being concrete/ashpalt, and then the buildings being brick. Everything else, I will probably use Substance Painter and play around with the smart materials and layers to achieve a good texture. Slightly lazy but I have left it way too late to design a new texture for all of these meshes p.s. mind my spelling of some of these files.

Dying In-game I wanted to add another animation to the game. A death animation would be cool so I downloaded unreal animation starter pack and following a tutorial for respawning, I created new controllers and large blueprints just to make this work and it's still not perfect. This has been the most stressful part to implement into the game and the blueprint and functions are everywhere.  Player Level BP  Character BP New Function New Player Controller Character BP Respawn Location Character Animation BP

Money Drops Being that my game's story follows a character that was formerly part of a gang in a district of china, I wanted to add pickups that the character can collect throughout the level. I decided on a money briefcase which are money drops left by the gangs for drug deals, etc; something along those lines. So I modelled a briefcase and in unreal put a rotation timeline on it along with a bounce. I would like to add a glow if possible too so that the player can more easily identify it in the levels. This will be featured in the player's UI with an integer that counts how many you've collected throughout the level. Just something else to add to the game a flesh it out a tiny bit more.

Interactivity In Game Double Doors I need to add some kind of interactivity to the game. First thing that the character will be  able to interact with will be a door. Not very interesting I know, but I'm starting with the basics. Using what I learned from the 'lectures' and blackboard videos, as well as more YouTube tutorials (common theme), I modelled my doors in Maya, in proportion to the rest of my game and had to animate it rotating on a hinge > bake animation > export animation clip > import to unreal engine. From this point I was able to create a blueprint with the skeleton, adding  a collision box which can trigger the animation when player overlaps the component (touches collision box). This was easy enough. I will copy this BP for my circuit breaker lever that I will be adding too. If I can find a way to add an interact button to my project, I feel like that would grip the player slightly more and make them feel as if its actually them doing the inte...

Starting My Character Blueprint Jump Starting my unreal project, I first wanted to set up and adjust my character. Give him a couple more things such as health and stamina with a sprint function and adjust the jumping so you can't jump as high as before, setting up variables. X and Y Movement After setting up the jumping, I decided that just moving in 2D space is boring, so I want to have a sidescroller that you can move back and forth in too. In the begging this was very tricky but I managed to figure out a solution by modifying the current inputaxis move right and adding inputaxis move back so that you can move in the X and Y axis'. This will add more depth to my game (literally). This would make it so that the models in game are not just there to add aesthetic to the game, but actually serves a physical function and can be used to add to the games interactivity. Health & Stamina This is where my blueprint for my character gets slightly more complicated. ...

So I decided to go for the slums  idea. Cool! Now I need to develop this further with another art bible. This will help me keep track of what I'm trying to achieve in my game, the kind of assets and environment I'm going for, the type of interactivity in the game I could implement and the type of story that could be driving the game forward. All of these are important aspects to keep in the front of my mind while designing everything so this part of the development process is crucial. STORY For the story, I wanted to go with it being set in China. You're apart of a dangerous gang operating in the lower city/slums, laundering money when you're caught stealing from the operation to profit yourself. For this betrayal, the gang has set a bounty on you across this district of China and everybody is now after you, from other gangs to civilians that want to make money and escape the terrible life they live. You must fight your way out and escape.

Brainstorming a few ideas for my game, I have three in total that I was thinking of developing. A futuristic city, slums, or sewers/underground. The reason for choosing these three kind of genres was for the simple fact that they interest me and all of them can be developed and implemented into a game with fun interactivity fairly fluently. My first task is to create an artbible for these three locations/genres of game that I was considering developing. This is what I came up with: CITY For the City idea, I am really inspired by games such as Mirrors Edge and Deus Ex. Games that have very minimalist architecture but present it in such a beautiful way; Mirrors Edge more than Deus Ex as that seems to be more grunge but I did this purposefully, to add contrast to what I could develop and do for a city. The interactivity for both games also compare quite a bit. Mirrors Edge features and bases itself almost entirely around movement and how you diverse the levels and world around you ...