Week 23 : Destructable Fences

This has been a strange week for the project for me. Stuck in a place between things to do. All week has been working on Unreal Engine 4 and testing the level. Lots of bugs to fix, lots of things to tweak.

My landscapes are now in place. I'm not 100% sure that they will be used but for sure these Unreal Engine landscape systems give us a great place to build upon. With some assets on them it should seem like a real yet cartoony world.

This week has had alot of working between the people making assets, concepting and characters. Constant communication. This is the key to group work!

These assets you see on the pictures are my next generation destructible planks. These are the gameplay system where our Big Alice can crush wooden planks by walking into them. Now they explode apart when you walk into them.

You can also see my particle systems in that image. A rough test at making glowing firefly like lights that shift and move and fade away. Helps make the place feel alive.

Above is water, which moves and shifts with actual waves. It may look cool but it's really just one of the ones designed by Unreal which I've tweaked to make fit our level design. The next test is to make it flow and interact with other assets. It just turns out this is really impossibly hard to do. But it's something to work on, the best way to learn is to tweak and play around with these things.

This is a hint for things to come, assets in the levels! They don't have textures for now but it's only early days. An early example of the forest level. Imagine this with way more trees in the background. I think it looks damn good, and this is just the start.

Week 22 : Builder of Worlds

This week things start to get real. The block outs start to make shape and the assets start being built.

The first issue with this week was going from white box blockouts to something more. How would I do this? Well my first idea was bricks textured in such a way to help the world feel alive.

But after a couple of days working on this I realised it looks... really really bad. So I scrapped this entire idea. This is something I'm starting to get used too, how we just throw ideas away in game art even after working at them.

So I moved onto using Landscapes! Landscapes are an Unreal Engine system that lets you paint earth and ground, then paint materials onto them. 

Most of this week has been split between the bricks idea and trying to make the Landscapes work how I want. This turned out to be harder than it sounded. I wanted to use multiple textures on the landscapes but making them work correctly and look good was hard but is now just about in place.

So now the materials start to blend together. This i think is going to be a great base for extra assets, which will be awesome.

Week 21 : All systems operational Captain

Over this last week we went from having basic mechanics to having the basic layout of the game. I've taken the liberty to blockout 4 ACTION PACKED levels of gameplay. Now all we have to do is concept and build assets for it.

This is the first level, the rabbithole. Environment wise this will be underground with lots of rock and dirt. It introduces the gameplay mechanics and how you have to change shape and form to interact with the environment. Originally we were planning to have a lobby system between levels but due to not being able to do it (and frankly it may have broken the flow of the game) we've removed that.

This is the forest level. You may notice it's filled with water, which isn't very forest like. The idea is that the part where Alice's tears flood the world is the introduction to the forest. But as we don't have trees yet of course it doesn't look very foresty. This level has some physics object puzzles including swinging and pushing.

This is the garden level. It's rather short but when playtested it had the players think alittle instead of just run through, so I think thats good. Anyway the plan is once we have a bunch of assets we could easily make these levels longer if needed. This level has alot of moving objects and platforms, aswell as a croquet based puzzle where you kick what will be a hedgehog.

And this is the final level, Back to Reality. I've just been calling it The End. This levels more abstract to show Alice leaving wonderland. Sharply moving platforms and things falling apart and destroying themselves.

So theres the overall jist of the game. The next step, which I'm looking forward to is concepting assets and building them. My job is going to be building the bricks for putting together the levels. I'm not ENTIRELY sure how this will work, So I want to try that out. But the overall art style for the level is down thanks to our concepting artists.

 The issue I'm having more is how to design bricks that fit together and look interesting but dont look stupid when together or apart. Luckily our game is going to have a fairly geometric art style so perhaps I can literally have bricks that will slot together? This is what next week will be for me building muddy rocky bricks. 

Week 20 : Down the Rabbit-hole

The dawn of a new project is always an interesting time. But this is not just any project; this is the Off The Map competition, in project form. A contest created in part by The British Library to bring literary worlds alive. 

This project follows Alice in Wonderland, or more accurately the original transcript of Alice's Adventures Underground. The OG Alice. We're tasked to create a game which is interactive and interesting grounded in this story. It's going to be a challenge, but might have a big pay out.

This of course is a group project. I'm working with brand new people I've never had the fortune of working with before. It's definitely going to be an interesting experience, (though we'll find out if interesting means good or bad later) The thing about this project though is we get the first tastes of being allowed a speciality. Which I'm excited for because it means I get to focus on Engine work!

And it isn't easy. But it is extremely rewarding. Originally we were instructed that this project has to be a side scroller. So we actually stuck in part with this idea. The first step was creating a character who is locked to a following camera but can move in more dimensions. We want to create a game where it works like a side scroller yet the camera can move to show more depth, and there is the possibility for third dimensional movement.

This is what this week has been for me. Getting to know Unreal Engine 4s blueprint system. It's strange but once you get the hang of just how it works you can make some really cool stuff.

We want to make a puzzle like game for example. Where you explore the environment and use Alices different sizes like in the book to do different things. Part of our idea is that Alice should be able to change at will and have 3 completely different forms that work differently. 

The way we have the game change between 3 different Alices is by having 3 seperate meshes. Of course right now they're placeholder. By toggling which Alice is visable it gives the illusion of it changing.

But just changing wasnt good enough. I want them to feel very different, so we can have different gameplay mechanics.

 So this is my current 'final' design for Alice. As you can see, it got more complex after another day ish of work. Now not only does the game switch meshes, it now edits the size of the collision mesh for the player character to an apropriate size. 

This means we can have areas little Alice can only get into. There are also parts for changing how the characters move. Their movespeed and the way they jump. This means little Alice has a very floaty jump which means we can have some awesome gameplay mechanics. The last part is for more interactive parts of the level, where only Big Alice can interact. I'm glad that I've managed to make this work already.

(I did have a video of these in effect but it turns out I'm not a gif maker)

The last major thing I designed over the week is a respawn system. Unlike the previous blue prints this one is based mostly off a tutorial, though tweaked for what I needed. 

Looks scary right? Thats only a part of it. This blueprint is in like 5 parts in different areas of different blueprints. Pretty complicated. But worth the time and effort. It means we can have danger in the level and respawn the players appropriately. 

So overall with this shortened week (short because of presentations taking up monday and planning all tuesday) I think I've done alot. While my group works on concepting I've started a blockout of how the levels could be played; 

Of course it's extremely rough. But its enough to start from. There are still alot of things that need work. The key thing is making the cameras work apropriately. Being able to sweep the camera at key parts, but still follow the player. Its hard because it requires interfacing between the level and the player characters blueprinting. But we can get it done.

 Once that is done I can work on more blockouts and designing more puzzles.  But over all I'm happy with where I've managed to get.