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.