Week Summary - BA2a Week 8 (Formative submission week)

Submission feedback

My feedback from the submission this week was mostly positive, which is a great feeling. I did receive some criticism, all of which I agreed with, including reframing my sell sheet to improve the layout and gear it more towards a target audience, and catching up with unfinished work. With regards to the game it was suggested to change the colour of the cleanable objects to make it clearer to the player which ones they were, and to edit some of the ending questions to make them less vague. I'll be making these changes throughout the next week.

Life drawing session

I'm trying to focus more on line weight and more nuanced anatomy in these sessions, as well as thinking more about the weight of the pose and catching myself out on bad habits I may have picked up.

Asset Creation

Continuing my work in substance painter, I've now finished texturing the rest of my model, which now just needs reassembled and taken into UE4.

Personal work

The end of this unit seems like a good time to include some personal projects I've been working on since september, including some commissions and monthly character design challenge entries.

Week Summary - BA2a Week 7

Game Project

As the bulk of the game was all finished last week, this week was more dedicated to small tweaks and polishing. I adjusted some timers according to feedback from playtesters and moved some cameras around to make navigation and general gameplay easier, as well as adding a logo to the start screen and a simple emissive map to the player character to make its eyes glow. I also adjusted some of the values in the post-processing volume (like the universal light level) to make the lighting function better and give the scene a better look.

Moved the starting camera to allow players to see the exit door and added a visual for the AI here

At this point I realised some of my playtesters were having trouble finding the last few objects in the room which they needed to clean to open the door. As well as adding some blocking volumes to stop objects being knocked out of the camera view, I added a function to them using event dispatchers which meant that if the door was clicked without first removing everything in the room, it would cause a point light in the object blueprint to turn on briefly and the amount of objects left to pick up to print to the screen. The blueprint for this as well as the conditions used to block the door opening are below.

I did attempt to add a pause screen to the game, but unfortunately the pause function didn't extend to things like timer widgets, which kept counting down even when the game was paused. I decided that getting this working wasn't a priority, but below is the blueprint section I was using.

Finally, I added the last main gameplay section, which is an interactive menu which asks questions that players have infer the answers to from the environment they just passed through. Due to the basic nature of the objects in this demo, in this case the screens were more of a trial-and-error guessing game, but I would want the final version of the game to let players figure out the answers without having to guess. In this version there are three questions with sets of answers which I arranged on canvas panels in the widget for the sake of keeping things neat. After getting all the correct answers (the game doesn't move on to the next question until the player chooses the correct option) the game displays a final string of dialogue with an end screen, and the demo is over!

I timed several people playing the game to see whether I was hitting the five-minute goal, and found that most people took around 4.5 to 6 minutes, so I think I would say it has a good length of play time. As for feedback, a lot of people seemed to really enjoy playing the game, as well as finding ways to break it, so I would consider this project a success by my own standards in that I managed to make a game that I and others enjoyed.

Asset creation
I started working on my model with substance painter, baking the different parts and painting the textures. Below is an exploded version of the roof section. I had some problems with the bake on this model due to a lack of detail in the low poly which I had to go back and fix, which delayed me a little.

I used two different fill layers for the wood grain here, one vertical and one horizontal, to make sure the grain was always going in the right direction. I may also include some emissive maps later.

Week Summary - BA2a Week 6

Game Project

I added a lot more polish to the game this week, adding more props and textures, including some rough textures for my player character, as well as some background music (royalty-free from Kevin McLeod) to make the experience feel less empty. Many of the props I constructed out of basic cuboids and are just representative, like a grey-box layout, to avoid constructing excessive props myself.

I got some help with the issues I was having with the dialogue overlapping last week and the problem was fixed fairly easily by moving the script into the UI blueprint instead of the individual text trigger, allowing the boolean I was using to function properly.

I also added some win and loss conditions into the game. The first room is won by removing all of the objects in it in a given time, triggering a win or lose event (and relevant text) which is determined by testing the length of the actor list to see if it equals zero after a delay (see below). In theory this should then open the door at the other end by changing a boolean in the blueprint to true, but I haven't managed to get this part working yet.

The second room works on a points basis, where every item cleaned gives 10 points. I plan to add a winning threshold for this room soon as well, once I've worked the bugs out of the first one. I've had a few people playtest the game so far, which has alerted me to some collision issues with the objects and the pawn blocking click events as well as things like the difficulty level; I thought that the objects were easy to clean up in the 15 seconds given, but others found it hard to beat the time limit.

Script to add points and add the new total to the screen

This section of the blueprint adds some polish to the beginning section, things like a light turning on and disabling player movement until the inital dialogue is finished. There were also some problems with the player spawning on the collision box which led to some of the dialogue being skipped which were fixed by force-firing the text when the game starts instead.



Finally I added a start screen to the game, rather than just launching the player straight into the level.

Asset creation

This week I was mainly focusing on the game project but in our session we started to look at substance painter and how to use it. It seems to be a very useful programme although I'm finding the interface a little overwhelming at the moment as there's a lot to look at.