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.