BA2B - Game Project - Week 3

BA2B Collaborative Game Project

Week 3

This week my task was to continue working on the environment and also implement a lot of the vegetation. The next thing I needed to put together in the level from Billy's concept art was a large elven bridge. The story about this bridge was that a long time ago, elves had lived in the area and they constructed a beautiful large bridge. The goblins however, ruined the bridge to later realise that they actually needed it to walk across; so they built a small hanging bridge. The bridge has a very interesting shape and because it was a massive structure, it would be on of the main focal points of the game for the player. I really like the sense of scale, as it will be a 'big reveal' for the player when they first see it.

Normally a large bridge like this would not be built by individual rocks, but since we only have 6 weeks. this was the solution for now. By the time I had come this far with the bridge, Nat and Charlotte had been able to create a couple of different plant and ground textures. So up next was for me to create the tilted plants in Maya. The process for this was very easy since plants are just a few polygons each. It was important for me to not go too overboard with the polygons when it comes to this since there will be a lot of them in the scene.

Here is an example of how the fern looks in Maya.

Fernplant in Maya, Texture made by Natalia Rojek and Model created by me.

Wireframe

After doing this with all the plant textures I got provided, it was time to get them in game. Here is an image showing them within the level.

This week I also played around with the lighting settings in Unreal Engine 4 and tried to add some more ambiance to the level. It was quite difficult because the time of day really effects the scene and all of its textures. In our meeting this week we talked about it and eventually decided to set the level at around noon and sunny, as this would show off the textures well and would be bright enough for the player to see. If we had a sunset, all textures would end up very orange and it takes away from the texturing of the assets. Also since the map has a rather dense forest this would result in the players path to be mostly covered in shadow which is a bit dull. Billy had the idea of adding a blue tint to the level which could act as a way to indicate that it was night, but again we thought that it would be best to have a game we could potentially show in our portfolios with the assets clearly visible.

Week 3 Summary

Week 3 was a bit of a slower week but the bridge scene took a very long time to create and place every rock manually. Now that I've gotten the hang of it, it should become a lot quicker in the future. We did get some critique from the tutors that the vegetation is currently too dense which we all agree with, and that the ground should be shown more.

It is great seeing the game come together though and everyone in the team is very excited to work on it. Since most of us will be going home over holidays we don't expect much progress to be done next week. We have said that if someone want's to they can do work on the game, but we don't expect anyone to have been doing work over the Easter break.