I wanted my Game to have a slight retro style to it, Especially as I love the video game, Space Invaders.
For weapon system reference, ,I am also taking inspiration from this video as well.
Since the final deadline for the Alice in Wonderland, Life has been looking bright for me. I am now working on a couple of personal projects as mentioned in the previously and I am loving the creative freedom. Ahh what a relief to be free. At the Moment, I'm currently working on a Ufo Space Invader mini-game. Of which, I wanted to make a game where you can fly an aircraft to save the planet from invading alien ufo. Of course, the project is still in progress, however, I would like to improve my skills of engine blueprints and material editing. In the course of the project I would also like to learn more about particle effects and construction scripts. I wanted my Game to have a slight retro style to it, Especially as I love the video game, Space Invaders. I have been heavily influenced by this video, for inspiration for the level. I enjoyed looking at this video, because of, how beautiful the scene is, but how enjoyable the test level looks to play. In my level I will hope to dissect a number of things such as camera shakes, turbo-boosts and engine emissives. For weapon system reference, ,I am also taking inspiration from this video as well. At the same time, I would like to create a believable level city based level and improve the water I created in engine. This Ocean Storm project, will be the influence for the water. The buoyancy of the water and objects on the water is incredible! So without Further ado, here are some white box screenshots of my current progress on the level:
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For 14 weeks my team and I have been working on the Off the Map project, and it is incredible how quickly the time has passed. The project has been a long and tedious process process at times. Nonetheless, I feel that I have learnt an incredible amount about myself and working in a team.
Ironically, I was not working in a team that I had originally thought I would be working with. I had little experience of working with my team members before and I had no idea what they thought of me. As a result, in the initial phases of the project I did feel uncomfortable about the position I was in. However, as time passed and we got to know each other better, I am glad that I got to work with hardworking and dedicated people.
For the off the map project, I performed many roles within my team, including character and level concepting, modelling, texturing and engine work.We worked as a team consistently throughout the level, bouncing ideas off one another and passing on assets for feedback or improvement. This process meant that all work was fitting to the style of the level. More importantly, it meant that no team member would become too attached to their work.
During the idea generation stage of the project, the whole team and I worked hard to gather many influences for the design of the level. This included mood-board creating , in order to identify a particular style that could be fascinating to explore. The team and I took familiar interest into the video game Ink-Quest and Su Blackwell.
I did enjoy this process as it meant that the team and I could visualise our thoughts to each other. Furthermore, it allowed us to highlight recurring themes in between our ideas.
Afterwards My team and I began concept production to portray our ideas even further. Throughout this process I painted a number of concepts to explore level design, colour palette, lighting and atmosphere.
In addition, I got the chance to create concept in 3d through whiteboxing. Firstly, I wanted to explore the possibility of an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ level in the gardens of the Queen of Heart. I enjoyed this idea exploration here and it was rewarding to create the maze-minigame. I felt, I had improved in my skills to portray ideas here, for this process did not take too long to create.
Afterwards, I moved onto concepting a 3d paper town. To fulfill this task, I heavily referenced the Lionshead level demo ‘Ink Quest’. Moreover, I also took inspiration from the SU Blackwell designs. I chose these two sources of influence because I believed their decorative style and use of paper was a fascinating element to explore. At this point my team and I were still designing the level, I thought the Paper town might influence it.
Unfortunately in the end, none of my concepts influenced the final design of the level. As Amber and Freddy were creating their own unique style, it was clear to see that they wanted to use as little influence as possible. They both worked with Braden to concept this whimsical and original design for our level.
Good Job Guys!
It would have been nice to have more say in the overall design of the level. At times I did feel left out during the level design process. Regardless, I knew that Amber and Freddy were trying their best to include every team member in the design process.
When the concepts were finalised and the assets in the designs for the assets had been depicted in the concept, Amber created an asset and texture list for the team. Thus we began making our 2D world come alive in 3D. Modelling was not too difficult a challenge. I was instructed to model the tree-stump, minecart , Cheshire Cat and the Dancing Mushroom.For the majority of my 3D models, I worked back and forth with Amber and Freddy, getting feedback to ensure that I was adhering to the style of our level.
After this process, I unwrapped my models. This wasn’t too challenging a process and I continued using the same workflow as mentioned above. Working off of team feedback was a beneficial practice. I felt that this process of going back and forth for critique really helped improve my skills. Similarly, this type of workflow is commonly practiced in games companies, thus I knew that we were working coherently as a group.
Afterwards, I moved onto texturing, my assets, this was a challenging task and by no means easy. the assets needed to match the concepts exactly, therefore extra focus needed to be to get the desired outcome for the assets. Some of my assets, such as the Tree-stump and the Cheshire Cat were textured by Freddy. This really took the pressure off me and I am glad she could help.
I didn't particularly enjoy the texturing phase of the project. Texturing is one of my least favourite phase of the creative process. In retrospect, I probably could have improved upon my textures to get a better effect. However, I frequently referred to Amber to make sure I textured correctly. I do feel like I have improved on my understand of PBR here, however, I will have to continue to work on my texturing skills for future projects.
It wasn’t all bad however. The creation of the dancing mushroom in Zbrush was a pleasant experience. I had the opportunity to sculpt the mushroom in Zbrush. this iterative process was delightful, as I was given almost complete creative freedom over the look of the mushroom. Of course I had to make sure that I payed close attention to the look of toadstools.
Afterwards, I polypainted the mushroom in Zbrush to create some interesting designs:
Once this process was complete I baked the high poly textures onto the low poly mesh I had previously made.
I felt that the dancing mushroom was a success because I improved on my skills using the mentioned software; I worked efficiently, but most importantly, I had fun throughout the process.
As discussed by the team, the majority of my work for the level would be in Unreal Engine 4. My first task in enine was to design the respawn mechanics. As there are death pits in our level, Amber wanted me to design a mechanic that allowed Alice to die and respawn to a set checkpoint.
This was a hard and challenging process to build throughout as I had little to no experience with engine blueprints, and it didnt;y help that I was under the clock to get the mechanic to work. I ran into many troubles with the blueprint functions and variables. In fact the whole blueprint was complicated to build. I followed a tutorial that did not seem to help, as the tutorial itself was incomplete. As a result, my character would respawn out of the level or disappear entirely, Thus, I had to make numerous iterations.
Eventually, I was able to fix the problem, with the help of my peer Dominic Mathuse. He did an excellent job of identifying the issues with the blueprint. from my observation, I may not have been able to fix the problem myself. thank you very much! Although creating the respawn mechanics was an unforgiving and gruelling task, I was able to improve upon my understanding of blueprint engineering in UE4.
When the respawn mechanics were completed I created the water for the pond section of our level. Again this was also a hard and unforgiving task. However, it ran smoother than the respawn mechanics, because I had a greater understanding of engine blueprints. throughout the process, I used the ‘Water Planes’ material examples by Epic games, for reference.
Of course I had to make many iterations to the blueprints as It was a complicated task to wrap my head around. Furthermore, I did not get it right the first time.
I completed my first version of the water, unfortunately however, the design did not have the desired look that my team had wanted for the pond and so I had to change it. I agree with my team as looking retrospectively, my first iteration did look too ocean-like.
After spending some time working on the blueprint, I was finally able to get the transparency and calmness of water that my team had desired.
Unfortunately, this water was not used in our level because of lighting issues. Instead, I worked with Freddy to edit the other type of water material that I had created. In actually I prefer this version more than the last. Although the transparent water is closer to the appearance of pond water, the water used in the level is more whimsical, adding to the overall atmosphere of our level.
Seeing my success with the water, Amber charged me with the task of creating several other effects in Unreal Engine 4. this included the creation of the waterfall, splash effect and water caustics light function.
I thoroughly enjoyed creating these effects. the process was quick and experimenting with the effect possibilities in engine certainly worked to pique my interests.
When all my work was completed for the team. Amber asked me to create matinee animations for the white rabbit and dragonfly. she wanted me to design an animation for the rabbit that appeared as if the rabbit was being moved by hand.To do so, I had to take influence from shadow puppetry.
I had fun working on this phase as it was a change of pace from the previous tasks. Moreover, I was glad to be able to help the team.
However, no team comes without its flaws and I did have minor issues working in the team., I would have liked to have more group meetings throughout the project, as they seemed to cease after the 5th week of the project. similarly, it would have been nice to have more say in the concept design ofthe level, however, in the grand scheme of things and the overall outcome of the level, it didn't seem to matter. I had thoroughly enjoyed working on this project. Naturally, when working in a time you will experience moments of friction. Similarly, spending 14 weeks on any projects will prove to become exhausting. however, I had a great time during the project. I had been going through bouts of low self-esteem from the results of previous projects, but the final outcome of the Off The Map project is something I take great pride in. Without further a-do here is our level:
I think Dan Bullock’s Alice model is fantastic and Braden’s user Interface are outstanding.
Freddy and Amber did a great job on texturing
and Luke’s Models and effects are superb.
I was able to learn an incredible amount about idea generation and the unreal engine 4. As a result, I feel that I have improved in my fundamental and technical art skills. Even though the work grew tedious at times, I am glad to have been able to work with hard-working and dedicated team members. to this day, I still do not understand some of the elements in our level, they are too whacky for me. However, this is fitting as we are ‘Off Our Rockers’.
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