BA2A Brief
At the start of the week we got our new brief for this unit. This time we are focusing on Interactivity. For this brief we have to do the following:
* A 10 page pitch document that examples a game design of our creation.
* We will create a interactive game prototype based on our game design document using simple mechanics implemented through UE4's "Blueprint". We will be focusing on polished gameplay and mechanics rather than creating art for the game.
* The theme for our game is "Flow".
We will learn:
* The (basic) UE4.
* Create indicative assets/artwork for use within the prototype.
* Explore interactivity through research, playtesting and iteration.
* Present your final game concept in a 10 page pitch document and playable prototype.
Personal thoughts
As a user of game engines for many years I am super excited to create a game prototype. This will be a great opportunity to start expanding my knowledge within the excellent Blueprint system. My plan to proceed from here is to instead of trying to come up with the most amazing game idea I will instead look around what sort of tutorials exists out there. If I am going to learn to use the engine I do not want to come up with a new ground breaking idea to later realise that there is no tutorials for what I want to create. I will start to collect lots of tutorials of different game mechanics and see what I can create from there. I am leaning heavily towards creating some sort of exploration title since my previous knowledge of CryEngine which is a engine mostly focusing on this kind of game play and Unreal is of course a perfect engine for this.
PBR Workflow and Unreal
After receiving the brief I wanted to properly research how the PBR workflow works within Unreal Engine. How to properly import an asset with PBR texture maps and different LOD's. (Level of Detail).
To do this I figured I would use one of my old more simple assets and ended up choosing a water bottle. Since my skill with 3D have increased since I created the water bottle I decided to remake the low poly, bake and texturing. Luckily the HP model was fine so that saved me some time.
To do this I figured I would use one of my old more simple assets and ended up choosing a water bottle. Since my skill with 3D have increased since I created the water bottle I decided to remake the low poly, bake and texturing. Luckily the HP model was fine so that saved me some time.
Waterbottle with 3 different LOD versions
Wireframe
The tutorial I choose to follow came from the great people over at Digital Tutors where they had a tutorial called "Game Asset Production Pipeline in Unreal Engine" which took me step by step through everything from collision boxes to LOD's. Luckily I had previous experience from this by importing my assets to CryEngine and it is a very similar process to Unreal Engine.
Tutorial Link: http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1635-Game-Asset-Production-Pipeline-in-Unreal-Engine
End Result in Unreal Engine
Research Survival Games
Since my game will be a Survival title I'd figure it would be a good idea to research other survival titles out in the market and write down what I like and dislike about the different games. There are lots and lots of survival titles out there but I decided to only take the ones I have the most personal experience with.
The game places the player in the fictional 225 km2 post-Soviet state of Chernarus, where a mysterious plague has turned most of the population into violent zombies. As a survivor, the player must scavenge the world for food, water, weapons, and medicine, while killing or avoiding zeds, and killing, avoiding, or cooperating with other players in an effort to survive the outbreak."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DayZ_(video_game)
Personal thoughts
Things I like with the game:
- The idea that you start with nothing and work yourself up to eventually find military equipment and so on.
- Loose everything you have worked for if you die, this creates some of the most adrenaline filled moments I have ever encountered in gaming.
- That people can talk to eachother using VOIP, this forces you to speak with people if you don't want to be killed. Thanks to this feature I have met many good friends through this game and also of course plenty of enemies.
- The large world, sure some people think this makes the game into a "Walking simulator" but me personally really like how large the world is and since it does take a long time to reach a destination on the map it makes the world feel massive.
Things I dislike:
- The clunky movement, this have been improved since launch but it is still very clunky and not acceptable in 2015's standards.
- There are no environmental threats, such as cold weather, fire etc.
- The zombies are the most awful AI I have ever encountered.
Description of the game from Wikipedia: "Ark: Survival Evolved (stylized as ARK: Survival Evolved) is an action-adventure survival video game developed by Studio Wildcard, Instinct Games, Efecto Studios and Virtual Basement. In the game, players must survive in a world filled with roaming dinosaurs, natural hazards, and potentially hostile human players.
The game is played from either a third-person or first-person view and its world is navigated on foot or by riding a dinosaur. Players use firearms and improvised weapons to defend against hostile humans and creatures, with the ability to build bases as defense. Players can also customize weapons using items scavenged from the environment. The game has both single-player and multiplayer options, with the latter allowing players to engage in simultaneous gameplay."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark:_Survival_Evolved
Personal thoughts
ARK is a very enjoyable survival game who finally brought AAA standards to a genre overloaded with indie titles. It borrows heavily from other survival titles but it also adds massive improvements to the mechanics. It is also using Unreal Engine 4 which is the engine we will be using to build our prototype which is a nice extra. (The game also looks BEAUTIFUL!)
Thinks I like with the game:
- All the things I liked with DayZ is also in here.
- The environmental dangers are really good, you always have to maintain your cold/heat which adds greatly to the experience.
- The world also have different "Biomes" such as Jungle, Arctic, Desert and so on which have different impact on your temperature! This both adds to the environmental danger feature but also adds great variation to the level design!
- The game is absolutely stunning which makes the player want to explore this greatly crafted world.
- The crafting let's you start from simple items such as spears and stone pickaxes to later in the game allow you to create crossbows and machine-guns. This makes the character progression great!
What I dislike with the game:
- The difficulty is extremely high, luckily you can modify this but still. If you loose everything you have worked for when you die it does make you feel a bit cheated if you don't even have a chase to survive an encounter with a dinosaur.
- The UI is very cluttered when compared to other Survival titles. I prefer it when only the necessary information are on screen or when you give the information by audio or ingame instead of through UI. For example in DayZ when you are hungry your stomach start rumbling and that's how you know you are hungry, but in ARK you always have UI to tell you exactly how much hunger you have.
Start working on the Game
Right, so after doing lots searching for different tutorials and research I have decided to work on a Survival title. I have found great tutorials about everything from Inventory systems to how to crunch smoothly.
