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.

Week 19 : Container Autopsy

Get it? Because we made a hospital/morgue for our container city project. I'm having an autopsy instead of a post mortem. Although a post mortem probably still would of worked as a pun anyway.

Yes the Container Project is finished! It was a good one, I thoroughly enjoyed making this level. I only had a small group of three but that allowed us to make a level that was small but perfectly formed. 

These are my favourite of the final screenshots I took of the level. Most of my time on this project was spent using Unreal Engine 4, being the engine editor. So basically I put this level together. My team helped of course this was all a team effort, and I say it did damn well.

But screenshots of a immersive interactive level dont just do it justice. The sounds we added and the motion can't really be shown. So here's a video walkthrough.

I'm really glad that we didn't have a huge amount of problems with this project. I started this project somewhat worried because my last group project went horrendously wrong. But our group worked together amazingly well. I think being a smaller group did help with that, so we spent alot of time working together closely in the labs. 

Also our time management was really good. Mostly in part to doing a very small level we could get everything done plus some of our stretch goals.We did have several issues but they were mostly with one of our team members having a hard time texturing. But we got it all done in time, and now she's improved her texturing skills doing this project. So everything's gone pretty well!

But we did have strange things break. Working on Engine work always ends up having strange weird issues happen. And we all know that talking about the stuff that went wrong is way better than talking about what went well.

Like our boxes being covered in gunshots when our normal maps got shifted around.

Our generator turning into a strange neon puke machine. This ended up to be an issue with metalness.

And also metalness causing more crazy problems. With having such a small atmospheric level the metalness tended to reflect and change colour alot really strangely. This was no exception. This truck is supposed to be white! But turned brown in the red container walls. That isnt that bad, but the white odd lines on the window caused by overlapping the uvs in the metalness map was a glaring error.

Also those wires you can see coming out of the truck? Thats the only major issue we couldnt fix. Sometimes Unreal does stuff you just cant work out and for no apparent reason these cables and wires just would not show as the right colour. But I let them slide as they look close enough.

Overall I really think this project went well. Our level has the theme and story that we wanted. It feels like part of a real place and we got it all done in time! I feel like doing this project I improved far more in my engine work and its only furthered my feelings that I love working in Engine. It's great fun and I got to learn all sorts of  things this time like moving objects, particle effects and atmospheric lighting. Being able to focus on Engine while my team worked more on assets and concepting them I think worked really well. 

Bring on more Engine work, I say.

Week 17 : I AM A MASTER BUILDER

So this week has been pretty rough, not in the work department but normal life. My computer of several years hand built with love and care finally got put to rest. It's going off to live on a farm now. So I haven't had a computer this time... So I haven't had a computer as well as other life problems.

I've been spending my week working in the labs instead, well far more than I would before hand. I think I like the labs much more now as before I was more prefering to work from home. But the lab atmosphere I'm starting to like, even if theres lots of crazy drama.

So when it comes to work I've spent almost all of this week working on Unreal Engine 4. Aside from these few small assets I made. These are really simple objects mostly just boxes, Theyre all things like signs and planks of wood, things we can use to make the environment feel far more alive.

So I am the Master Builder of this project. My two other teammates have been working their asses off making assets and also working out some particular blueprint tasks and I've been making them all work together in unreal.

I think I'm really starting to love environment art. Just putting everything together is very fun to me, and especially adding particles and sound cues and matinees! I think I might just be steering towards chosing environment art as my future.

Our level focusing on creating a horror game like atmosphere has alot of stark 

 lighting and I've even been adding flashing lights and spooky environment effects.

Atmosphere turns out is hard to create. Especially making it feel like a hospital. 

This is an example of how I've blocked off a path.Years of seeing blocked debris passages in games I finally get to make one haha!

This is our level over all so far. We were suggested to make it smaller so I did. But now we have lots of assets to use I've gone back in adding extra corridors and extra side paths that may be blocked off but help make our hospital setting feel more real. 

Week 16 : Spooky Cargo

This week has been really quite eventful. Last time we had only just decided to create a horror game style level. And now by the end of this week we have the basics of the level down and the basics of lighting.

I started off by building the walls to make our level out of. Having these done let me create the level properly. While we did have 3D container models to work off, I decided on remaking them as the last was far too high on the tri limit.

To fit with the dystopian theme we want to run the project off I made sure to have the containers nice and rusted over. This makes the lighting work nice and interesting with PBR ( which is amazing.).

From here it was apparent we had done too much concepting. I feel all of the groups have, atleast from what I've heard. I don't think anybody really got the idea that we weren't meant to concept much in this project and take some idea generation short-cuts. So after this I made up the level using these container parts.

There were a few issues on the way, especially with getting the exact scaling right but now the whole thing works wonderfully thanks to the help of my group.

This is our level planned out. As you can see we took out one whole room, as it was pointed out to the group that maybe focusing on making something small really well is probably smarter than trying to make something bigger.

Some things we need are blueprints for lighting switches and the elevator, though my group has set this up and just needs the assets. Really all we need now is a bunch more assets as now I've set up some nice lighting.

I'm the main engine guy for this, and that mostly means working on the lighting. I've also taken some time working on particle effects. Of course it's quite hard to see on a screenshot, but I've got dust floating in the air helping add to the dank creepy atmosphere.

I think as a group we're in a really good place. This next week is just going to be making awesome assets and populating the level with sweet stuff. I'm excited to see what we can make by the end of this!

Week 15 (maybe) : Cargo Containers

Container City project! The first thing we have to do after the long winter holidays. An environment project where everything is based on cargo containers. I think this will be great fun, though I am wary after the last group project I had to do went so badly.

But first the winter break! I had a great holiday, and actually did quite a lot of work. Most of this was revolved around making my portfolio website. www.olismithart.com It isn't much, but it's  a place where I can start to make more professional place to put together my portfolio! I need to do more work on it but hey, I'm happy about it. I also did several character projects over the holiday making sure to keep my creative brain working!

And now I have to use my creative brain again! Our group started off strong. We made a level block out as fast as possible;

Having this let us start designing and coming  up with ideas really quickly. We wanted to focus on the dystopian idea. Our first few brainstorms came up with ideas like creating a container city based factory, or gang hide out. One idea of mine was a super villians lair like The Jokers. But basically to stop ourselves getting to set in an idea at this point we all just concepted whatever came into our minds. 

The first step as always is moodboards. With a group project its great, everyone can make about 8 moodboards and between us we have a huge selection to look through. Mostly I focused on how to make things look old and abandoned, and also flooded as I like the sound of having a flooded room.

Heres a small selection of my thumbnails. I ended up making somewhere around 50 thumbnails. All just quick 5-10 minute very rough sketches. Of course they aren't super high detail but I like them for getting ideas across. 

Then looking again at the blockout we improved it. I had my first design, a group member had another and we mashed them together to create this. We want a level thats short but has alot of detail inside of it. Like a bioshock like game, where you walk around and find these nice details all over the level as you back track. As this project is all modular we can definately make more rooms as a stretch goal.  We also chose our theme. Medical. We plan to create a sort of makeshift ward and morgue in this container city, and focus on making it eerie and creepy as possible.

Making these modular parts is my current objective, after concepting some. I want to make walls and floors so we can start making the bare bones of the level as quickly as possible. So thats where I am right now.

And I leave you with the first of my fancy concept arts. I like it. It  isn't great but, I like it. It works. It really captures the creepy atmosphere we want to use.