BA2B - Game Project - Week 6

BA2B Collaborative Game Project

Week 6

Final Week

This week was the final week so my job was mostly to just finish of the game. The things I had left to do at the beginning of the week was the following:

- Continue work on the Environment (Village and Ending)

- Add the gameplay using the blueprints I created the first week, 

- Add the Audio into the game.

- Replace the Hands.

- Adding the UI.

- Further polish

Replacing the Hands

The first thing I got done this week was replacing the players hands. This was the largest immersion breaker of the game that we still had to get rid off, because we couldn't really keep the robot ones! Since it's the last week I decided to use a base mesh when creating the hands. I edited the hand in Zbrush to fit more with the style we wanted. We decided in the team that we wanted our hands to look like the ones in Firewatch, which are very stubby and has square fingers. Here is the result.

Creating the low poly was an easy process since the base mesh already had very good topology, I just had to lower it to the lowest sub division and it turned out great. For the UVW's I used the Zbrush UVW mapper plugin which works well for organic pieces like this one. To get the hands ingame I used the same technique as I did for my game prototype back in BA2a so it was a rather smooth process. I did however had some issues with getting the skinning right in Maya, but with some great tips from Steven and George we resolved those issues.

Hands in-game untextured.

I do wish that the thumb would be a bit better positioned but because we had so much left to do I had to leave it as is. Natalia created a texture for the hands and they turned out like this;

Arm Texture created by Natalia Rojek

The hands now looked a lot better but it did have an annoying mesh error at the side, as well as feeling a bit bare so we gave Charlotte the task to add to Natalia's skin texture.

The new arm texture created by Charlotte

The Beginning and the End.

The team had now modelled and textured the stage assets so it was time for me to create the beginning and the end of the level. To begin with I quickly created a simple room in Maya.

Room in Maya

The beginning of the level

The end of the level

Voice Recording

Since we want a few voices in our game, we decided to have a voice recording session. Luckily Charlotte has a really good microphone so we could do the recording here without any issues of bad quality. We gave Billy the role as the Director and Jack as the actor. As the Director, Billy would say lines that would play in different situations in the game. For example, when you get hit by an arrow he will say "Keep rolling" e.t.c, to enhance the feeling of you being an actor in a movie. Since he was the director we came up with the idea that it would be cool if his voice sounded as if he spoke through a megaphone, so in Sony Vegas I edited his voice and the result came out pretty good.

We also got the clipper ready and textured so I created a short intro to the game where the clipper would be animated infront of the player as the director says "Aaand Action!".

With Jack's voice I didn't need to do any changes since his lines was mostly just grunts such as "Ouch!" when you as the player got hit by an arrow.

Main Menu and UI

Charlotte finished the UI design so I just had to implement it into the game. I was going to research how to do a proper main menu that loaded on a separate level (so we could have a loading screen), but due to lack of time I had to resort to my old solution from BA2a where the menu is basically just an overlay on the game itself with the game paused in the background. The UI did feel a bit flat in the beginning but as soon as we got the blinking text and the music in there it came out much better. Here is a video showing it in action.

As for the stamina bar it was just a matter of replacing graphics, same with the health.

Environment Polish

While placing the goblins on various places throughout the level I also polished the environments as I went along. Here are some screenshots of the final environment.

Player Speed, Ambiance and Footsteps

For the Ambiance and Footsteps I had to get a bit creative with the Blueprints. Since we have a specific player path, I could easily control these sounds by the player walking through collision boxes. 

With the first blueprint I specify what kind of surface the player will be walking on. Depending on what I choose, it plays a different footstep sound that I created by downloading various sounds online and editing them in Sony Vegas. I can also adjust the sound speed of the footsteps so if the player is running, the footsteps will be quicker.

With the second blueprint, I can decide the player speed and also how much I want the camera to headbob. This is to further increase the immersion of the players experience in the game.

With this third blueprint, I can decide what ambiance will be playing. I can mix and match if I want as you can see on the picture below. Since the player will be entering a cave with a stream inside, I have checked both the Stream and Cave ambiance to be activated.

Gameplay and Events

As for the Gameplay it's pretty much the same as it was in week 2, but now with replaced models. It was just a matter of placing out goblins, a target point for them to aim at and a collision box to tell that specific goblin when to shoot to hit the player.

To make the environment a bit more interesting I added special events at two locations. If we had more time I would further polish these events and also add many more but this would have to do for now. 

The first event is that a firemage will shoot a fireball on the mountain which will cause rocks to fall down, fortunately for the player they miss him. Here is a video showing this event:

For the second event another firemage will destroy the bridge which will cause you to have to jump over the broken bit. This would be further polished with voice acting etc but we ran out of time.

Summary of Week 6

The game is now finished and this was a great project. I was very lucky to be with such a great group where all of us were very motivated and hard working. This game would be impossible if we did not have the team spirit that we had throughout the project. As always with games you wish that you would have an extra week or two to polish the game further but I am still super happy with the end result. This week was tough but we made it in the end. I learnt a lot throughout this project about Unreal Engine and also about working with a larger project with people. It was interesting to be at the end of the process and wait for others to create 3D or 2D instead of myself creating the 3D assets but the team worked so hard so it wasn't any trouble.

Overall this project have been a great experience and I am super proud of what we achieved in such a short amount of time. 

Here is a full playtrough of the game:

BA2B - Game Project - Week 5

BA2B Collaborative Game Project

Week 5

This week my focus was to finish the environment, as well as adding some more gameplay and sounds to the level. Like the last blogpost, this one will be very image heavy since it's the best way to show off the process of my level design. We now have almost all the assets textured which really has changed how the environment looks.

To make it a bit easier for the player to be able to notice the goblins, I usually place them together with our goblin assets. However, I also have some goblins that are alone to catch the player off guard a bit to enhance the difficulty of the gameplay.

This area was a bit tricky to figure out how to fill out. Since the road goes from the village up towards the bridge, I had to come up with a reason to why the player shouldn't just head straight towards the village. We discussed this as a team and decided to block the path with logs on fire, which makes sense because they wouldn't want the humans to go through there anyway and this forces the player to head up towards the bridge.

We also discussed as a team how we could make the path up towards the bridge more interesting and decided to make a sort of stone staircase like the thousand steps in Skyrim. This turned out really well and we also decided to put in standing stones to add a mystical elven feel to parts of the level. This was also to show that the standing stones have some sort of "Power" to them, which is why we also added glowing mushrooms (created by Nat) around them. We originally used the orange version of the mushrooms for the caves but realised that the blue ones could be considered the "Magical" version.

I had an idea that the goblins had destroyed the standing stones and placed skulls and various stuff on them instead and it turned out more aesthetically pleasing in the game.

We needed another major goblin camp to add more variation to the path so it wasn't just standing stones and stone slabs. This also enhanced the gameplay in this area because it allows me to place more goblins while at the same time making sense.

The Goblins

Our original plan was to create our own goblins but since we were running out of time we decided to use the ones from the "Infinity Blade Asset Pack" and just re-texture them to fit Billy's concept art. This was a shame because Charlotte and Billy had spent time designing how the goblins should look like but it wasn't totally in vain because Nat used it for inspiration while texturing the new goblins.  

New goblin texture to the Left, Old to the Right.

This saved us a lot of time, and I did some slight modifications to the old goblin model to add our own interpretation of it. Luckily the flaps on the helmet of the old goblin were perfect to turn into goblin ears by just rotating them upwards. A very handy thing was that the goblin already had a skeleton rig in Maya setup and ready for us to use. This allowed me to very quickly make a few different versions of goblins sitting down etc. 

Goblin in Maya with Rig

Steven gave me some really helpful animation tips while posing him which made his stance feel a lot more natural.

Picture showing the different goblin poses

Natalia also textured the fire mage. This was a great collaboration because everyone was involved with the goblins. Billy and Charlotte did the concepts, Natalia textured them, Jack modelled the staff (Textured by Charlotte) and I implemented them and did the blueprints to make them come alive in game.

The Bridge

It was now time to create the goblin hang bridge. This was a tricky one because I had to create the bridge in Maya without any idea how big it had to be to fit. Me and Jack discussed this and we decided that it was best if I made the bridge, because then I could play around with the scale and make it match. Creating the bridge itself was very easy, just a few planks that Charlotte textured and the ropes were just cylinders that I applied a red colour texture to in Unreal. 

As for the ramp leading up to the bridge I had to get creative with what I had. It was difficult to follow billy's concept here since the terrain would not let me reach all the way up, because of how the terrain in Unreal works. Basically it's driven by a height map so it doesn't let you do engravings. So the terrain would clip into the hole of the bridge. Here is an image describing what I mean.

Yellow would be the terrain

I solved the issue by making a staircase instead of the stone slabs and stretch them out. The team really liked this and it did indeed turn out very well.

Continue expanding the level

I thought it would be nice to have a waterfall in the level and a stream that was running down hill so I exported some of the water particle effects from Epic's Particle Cave level.

Since the path downhill is so steep, I will make it so that the player runs quicker here than the rest of the level. This has made it a more unique place within the level and since there are goblins spread out, it will be one of the areas that requires a bit more attention from the player to not get hit.

Here is an overview of the environment so far. The only bit that's left to create is the village itself.

The Village

As for the village we decided that it would be good to have a wheat field before the village itself, so I tasked Charlotte to create a wheat texture. I decided to just do a rather quick pass of the village for now so I can further polish it next week. I created the village by the end of this week so I really just tried to get the environment done. 

Close up of the wheat textured by Charlotte

Village in early stages

Week 5 Summary

Week 5 was a very productive week. I got almost the entire level done with the exceptions of a bit of extra polish and the very end bit. Everyone in the team feels very confident that we now can finish the game in time. Next week I will be focusing on getting the game finished. This includes adding all the audio, the gameplay itself, polish the environment and adding the UI.