BA2A - Week 4

Week 4

Games Pitch

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.

I also now had to come up with a title for the game, I wanted it to have to do something with snow but not to cliché. I started looking up different words for snow/snowstorm and found out that "Whiteout" was a thing. So I decided to call my game "The Whiteout".

Feedback

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.