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.
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