Since I now had my new setting it was time to rework the UI to fit the theme. Since it has a celtic/tribal setting I figured I could use celtic symbols to represent the different stats and leather as the menu background. The UI went through a few iterations due to feedback.
UI Mockup
First UI iteration ingame
As you can see I used leather as a backdrop for the Inventory and the stats, I got some realy good feedback that the temperature meter looked more like a waterdrop than cold so I ended up changing that one. I also did not like how the hearth came out, it's a bit too messy, so I changed to a less cluttered version of a Celtic hearth.
Final UI
I also changed the cursor for the game to again increase the player immersion. To explain the UI a bit more I will include one of my pages from the pitch document.
Fireplace Fuel System
This week I also started working on a fuel system for my Fireplace. The system will basically require the player to gather wood to fuel the campfire and keep it alive. This was inspired by ARK: Survival Evolved where they do have a very similar system. However, I did stumble upon some issues which did not get resolved this week. For some reason my Blueprints have an issue communicating with eachother. I did create a forum post on the Epic Forums to hopefully get this problem solved.
As you may have seen above, the pitch document is progressing nicely. I did have an issue with coming up with a good looking design for it. I tried to make the presentation fit to the Celtic/Tribal theme so first I tried to have a cave background but it was way to noisy. I thought for myself which games are fantasy setting but still have a very nice slick UI. Then Skyrim came to mind, so as you may have noticed it is very inspired by Skyrim's UI design.
This week we had to make a smaller pitch of our game prototype, this was not the 10 pages long game pitch but a smaller one just to see our progress so far and get feedback. This was very valuable for me because I ended up changing my setting completely after the pitch was done due to feedback. I will write more about that later in the blogpost.
So due to the game pitch I had to start thinking more about my core game loop. What do I want out of my prototype. Since it's just a prototype of course it cannot have the most complicated one but still it's good to have one to keep you on track. A idea I got that I realy liked was the idea of having a "Safe Zone". I got the idea from playing Ark, where first when I played without having a place to call my "Base" I felt sort of lost, but after finally building my first base the game got a whole other feeling. I now had a place to call home, to always come back to when I have been out exploring. That's why I thought this would be great for my prototype. It would both act as a safezone and a place where the player always could go back to after his/her adventures.
My prototypes core game loop
The Safe Zone built by assets provided from the free "Infinity Blade" pack.
When the presentation was done people did like my idea (Even though a bit over ambitious) but I did get one great piece of feedback which really stuck with me and it was that the narrative was a bit missing. I had been so focused on the gameplay mechanics so I hadn't really given the narrative a proper thought. So that was about to change.
Aneira: The Hunt
Since the game was greatly lacking in narrative I sat down and started to properly think about what I wanted my world to be. The result was a complete rework of the story and setting. The new setting is now a world inspired by celtic/tribal themes and the game is now called "Aneira: The Hunt".
You are now playing as a young woman named Aneira, (Snow) a name given because of her exceptional survival capabilities in the wild. Living among other hunters in a tribe who are the believers and followers of the goddess Meev “Wolf Queen”. To pay respect to their Goddess they every year have an event called “The Hunt”, this is the time when 5 sons and 5 daughters are sent off to the north to find and slay a Giant, or better known as Fomorian. A Fomorian is a very dangerous type of Giant who feeds on the flesh of animals and Humans. Many people never come back from The Hunt, either because of the dangerous cold up north or because they have lost a battle with a Fomorian.
The game takes place a week into the Hunt and you are the last one alive. Your main priority is now to stay alive and fight both the cold and the giants roaming the lands.
Here is a short video I created just to set the mood of the new setting:
Game Mechanic Progress
Due to the new setting I had to remove some of the old assets such as waterbottle and tincans and replace them with more fitting objects such as bushes which the player can gather for food etc. I also did further polish on the movement and the immersion of the game by adding smooth crouch, running and footstep sounds. The later one was an interesting process because I started off by following a tutorial which did it in a very complex way but to later replace it with a way easier blueprint. The first tutorial was created for having different surface types and such but since the world is mostly covered in snow this was not needed for my prototype.
Here is an image of the complicated footstep mechanic, where it take in consideration what kind of material the player is walking on.
Complicated Footstep method
This was the easy way that I ended up with that just basically just uses a sound cue with 10 different walk sounds that I got from "Freesounds.org" and edited using Sony Vegas. The sound cue then picks randomly from these 10 and every time they play with a different pitch to make them sound different every time the player walks. Since the player cannot see his/her feet it doesn't matter when the sound plays, the only thing I had to change to match were the headbobbing but that was easy by just tweaking some numbers.
Final Footstep method
As for the running mechanic I wanted something more than just a simple speed boost when holding shift. I really like how the running feels in games like COD and Farcry where when you bump into stuff the player stops to run and so on. So I found this really good tutorial where they showed how to implement a bit more advanced sprint mechanic into UE4 using Blueprints. This person had several excellent tutorials which I used to create my game prototype.
Overview picture of my movement blueprints
Parts of the run mechanics and headbobbing
Smooth crouch using timeline
Game Testing
For my gameplay to be as smooth as possible I arranged a small playtest with friends to get some hands on feedback of my movement. I got some very good feedback about that the headbobbing was too much and made some feel slightly ill so after some tweaking I managed to get it so everyone was happy. It was also very valuabe to see someone else play it to see how much they understand by themselves and how much I will have to explain using ingame tutorials.
With the Inventory system partly done (Will update the graphics at a later state) it was time to build the world itself. To do this I decided to use a software called "World Machine". The reason I choose this piece of software was because I have had earlier experience with it by creating a world for Cryengine a while back. It is a very quick tool where you can make a world in just a few minutes to later bring into Unreal and texture. Texturing it will be a rather easy process because most of it is just Snow and snowy mountains.
Since it was a while I used World Machine I watched a tutorial to refresh my mind and also to teach me how to correctly implement the world into Unreal Engine.
Here is the tutorial I followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9WTKK9f1b8
My world created in World Machine
When my world was done it was time to implement it into Unreal engine, this was a very easy process of extracting a Height Map from World Machine and bring it into Unreal Engine's terrain tool.
Image of the terrain just being imported into Unreal
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Terrain in engine without texture work
Now is was time to texture the world. I started off by using different snow textures I found in the free asset pack on the store by Epic Game's "Infinityblade" game but to later replace it with my own texture because I wasn't pleased with the one provided in the package.
The world before texture paint
The world after texture paint
Top down view of the world,
The trees I used for the prototype were also provided by the Infinity blade asset pack, however I did have to do some tweaking to the LOD's but that was an easy fix.
Now it was time to add some weather effects, again taken from the Infinity blade asset pack which had all the kinds of particles I needed which was perfect for a arctic environment! Some were also taken from the Epic Game particle effects cave demo!
I also experimented with grass in the environment, in the end I decided not to with so much grass because it looks rather odd in a heavily snowy environment where the grass would technically be buried underneath the snow. Also it is a lot more performance heavy to have scenes with lots of grass.
Player Movement and Immersion
Another part I started to touch on this week was the player movement, since the focus of this brief was "Flow" I think the player movement is very important. I found plenty of tutorials all from head bobbing to footstep sounds. I also added ambient sounds to make the player more immersed into the environment.
The focus of the game is the Survival aspect. The greatest dangers of the game will be the cold environment and starvation. Throughout the creation of the game I will be adding more dangers such as wolfs, frozen lakes (Player goes through the ice), bandits?, etc. It all depends on how much work lies behind it all.
The creation of the game will be taken in steps. I will start off very basic by creating a working inventory system, from there I will create various pickup items such as Food, Water, Wood, etc. After that is done I will start making the world using world generator and create a very simple snowy forest environment. In the beginning the game will have a lot of fog around the player so the view distance is very short and thus it doesn’t need to be the best looking game to start off with.
Another thing with the game is that I want a very minimalistic UI, preferably the screen should be completely empty from UI if you don’t have your inventory open.
The first feature I wanted to implement into my game was the inventory system, since this is one of the most important features of my game I wanted to make sure I got this right. I found this really good and in-depth tutorial created by Epic Games themselves! It was 9 parts long but showed me step by step of the process!
Link to tutorial series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4tltrLLVuQ&index=1&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gZalvQWYs8sc7RP_-8eSr3i
The way I approached this was to first follow the tutorial step by step and to later modify it into my own liking. For instance the tutorial version have Health, Energy and Mood which have replaced with "Health, Hunger and Temperature". The good this with this particular tutorial was that it showed you a very customizable way of doing a inventory system. If I want to add new items into the game all I have to is to copy another objects blueprint and change the values.
