Ba2b Evaluation!

BA2b was the most challenging project I have ever done, here at the end of the project I have a defiantly seen a feeling of improvement in my skills since the project began, one of the more important life lessons I learned is choose your teammates carefully. The project began with learning that the rest of BA2b would be collaboration projects, and the first project involved me working with other courses for a week on creating a presentation for a mundane object, this project allowed me to follow a dream I always considered doing in my spare time of creating a comic book. It also showed me the speed of my work flow, and the fact that my biggest problem throughout this entire project was that it always took me longer than I thought it would to finish work, this is something I need to work on over the summer holidays and at the same time improve on my 2D and 3D skills.

For the research into all the projects including CS work, I was able to find results of what I was looking into fairly quickly. For the blueprints in Unreal took a bit more searching, most of my blueprints were easy enough, using the blueprints I made last term as starting points for some of the mechanics, and with help from the tutors and online research I was able to discover the rest in a short amount of time.

In the second project we had six weeks to make an effective game that uses only one button to play, at the beginning this was a unique an fun project to do, and the fact that I was working with others meant that we could produce more work than normal and make the game look way better than the previous games jam. That dream soon turned into a nightmare as more than half the team showed bare minimum contribution to the game production and I was left to build the game on my own from the beginning in less than half given project time. This annoyed me to a large extent that only myself and my team leader where pulling our weight throughout the entire project and at times having to do their work alongside my own to produce the game on time, I am pleased that a couple of the team members pulled through and didn’t leave me to work alone on this project. The 2D side of my work has improved an effective amount in terms of skill for this project, I was drawing vehicles which I had never attempted before, and was able to realise my flaws in the early designs and improve on them very quickly, pushing myself to get better and quicker in the process. The final term of my 2nd year in university has defiantly been a tough one; I do feel that this has been the most effective in terms of skill development. However this is merely the calm before the storm that is the third and final year of the Games Art Course.

Week 6 Collaborative Game Summary! (Week 27)

Unreal Level Design:

The final week, and my role with unreal is to finish building the level, continuing on with placing Georgia's building assets in the level, while building the level I made the decision to add in easter egg routes into the city environment in case the player fell off the track, upon where I chose to make the main aim of the game to get to the button instead of choosing which track to drive on.  Once I made my mind up on setting the rule of the player can take any route to get to the button I began to construct the city layout so that there where multiple ways to get to the button and some of which could only be accessed by going off the track.
On early Monday afternoon Georgia imported a majority of the textures for the building including the button which had our team logo on it, by the end of Monday I had finished the majority of the city with the lower half and end game screen to do before it was ready to be packaged. 

 

Scott's environment piece that failed to blend into the background well.

Continuing on from Monday I set out to finish the level so it be packaged before Thursday, this was pretty much the same as the Monday adding in the lower half of the city, making sure the buildings didn't interfere with the track, and adding a few new easter egg routes. While I was playtesting it to make the easter egg routes worked, a fellow student suggested that I add a timer to make it interesting and pointed me in the direction of tutorials on how to make said timer, the tutorial itself was simple but I encountered a problem and was later told by a tutor that I had made the binding the wrong variable, and after quick sort out I had a timer in the top corner of the game.  By the evening I had finished the environment building layouts and Georgia had imported the rest of the textures on the buildings in so the only thing left was the end UI screen (read below) and the music which thanks to the blueprints and the spare music (which I got from freesounds.org) I made from my last project didn't take very long.  After tweaking some the effects and adding billboards on a number of buildings (due to high demand) I had finally finished making the game, all that was left was to package it.  Wednesday I changed the default opening level because when packaged the game opened up the original file I received two weeks ago. Thursday I successfully packaged the game.

Concept Art:

This week I focused on getting the end screen UI page done, and making up a small GDD (Games Design Document), using the UI title page I did last week I made a similar end screen, which has the same concept as I did for the last piece, adding shadows and highlights and speed boosts to the car, as well as the button with the team logo on it.  Adding a level complete sign with the font I collected from dafont.com, giving it the neon 80's look and finishing it by importing it into Unreal and changing the replay and quit buttons with the image boxes I made. With this complete everything for the game was finished.

 

While waiting for the game to be packaged, (I had to use a tutor PC to package because the Uni's system wouldn't let me package it by myself) I did some pages for our pitch document because the group voted to do a pitch document.  I made a flow page, a character selection page, an interface page, and a level design page, the interface and level design page where done by paint overs of the game, and adding stats to the interface page.  The stats part for the interface and cs (character selection) pages where done by looking at lightsabers because ep's 5 & 6 came out in the 80's, also using a couple of the UI artist's work. Using the designs I made for the cs page and using the screenshots, title page and end game screen I made the flow page.  Finishing the whole thing by adding the glowing neon effects to the pages ready to present.   

Strengths & Weaknesses:

My Strengths this week where that I was able to create and build the game from start to finish in 2 weeks, and I was able to get a better handle on Unreal engine this time around, also adding to the fact that I was in a reasonable place with my recordings of all my work, with nothing but the final evaluation to do on the last night. 
My weakness this week was that it took me longer than I thought it would to complete everything, I wanted to have to level design environment done by Monday but ended up finishing it on Tuesday due to the amount of Easter egg tracks I wanted to add.  Once again our group barely showed up, with the exception of one of our team mates in the later half of the week to work on a small GDD consisting of the groups work, Next time I do a group collaboration project I hope I end up with a team that does actually care about the project.

Week 5 Collaborative Game Summary! (Week 26)

Unreal Blueprints & Game Building:

Continuing on from the end of last week, my main focus this week was getting the game mechanics and blueprints finished for our game so I could start making the level.  Starting off with how I was going to be able to turn the vehicle, I created a character class blueprint and copied what I'd done with the actor blueprints, but then decided to add in the basic third-person character start-up blueprints, this however was unsuccessful.  

After talking with the tutors on the situation I learned that by setting it so the mouse is viewed at the centre of the screen, by dividing the viewport size by 2 and then minus that by the mouse position will set the overall mouse position.  So when force is going along the x axis and the mouse moves left, the car moves left, and when it moves right, the car moves right.

While it was good that I got the car to move left and right by following the mouse cursor, it wasn't what I was looking for, So I went on to look up how instead of the car moving left or right through the mouse, the car and and camera both turn left and right through the mouse. This blueprint was difficult to find, most tutorials I found ended up being third-person character blueprints which when I put into the game failed to work or even run.  I consulted with the tutor about my problem, and was told that the add force blueprints keep the camera locked in one position, and would have to change it so I started off with speed rather than gaining it when going downhill.  After removing this, I learned that also the follow the mouse blueprint will be changed to make this work, and was placed at the beginning.  Next up was a branch that's condition was a boolean called controls active which basically allows the controls to work, this leads to an input vector which it's target is the character movement and will get it's world vector by having the forward vector multiplied by the speed of the character, this input goes into a controller yaw input.  After that adding a movement input for the forward and right actor vectors to have a world direction input.  Next the scale value of the actor right vector, this was achieved through getting the mouse x connecting that to normalize to range which was multiplied by another actor right vector.  This also connected to the controller yaw input by multiplying the value by the return value.

Once this blueprint was made, when the game started up it moved at the walk speed I set it to gaining no speed by going downhill, but in return allowed me to move the camera left and right as well as the car itself.  I wish I could have kept the downhill force blueprint but ultimately getting the vehicle movement was the biggest problem in the game, taking me 3 days to complete what Matt our main programmer could not in 4 weeks. 

Now that the blueprints where made it was time to make the track, because of the downhill momentum blueprint unable to work I decided to make the level layout more of a challenge for players.  First I imported the model of the track Georgia did in Maya, and correcting the auto collision I put the car in and took it for a test spin. The results are below.

(Unfortunately my laptop can no longer run this game without crashing, so from here on everything will be photos)

While it did stick to the road, there where parts where you couldn't tell what was happening, so I asked Georgia to break the track pieces down and re-send them, once that was down for whatever reason unreal wouldn't let me import the small track beings as FBX files and would crash every time I tried.  After asking around I learned that at the moment only OBJ files can be imported, so I imported them as OBJ's and annoyingly the auto collision correction button took a good 2 1/2 hours to go through all track pieces, but once done the car will be moving on the track, not above it or pushed to one side.  But with one problem solved equals another problem gained, after putting them into the scene, I discovered that because Georgia had broken her track in various places to get the pieces, she had forgotten to centre pivot each piece before she saved them.  So I needed to take them into Maya re-centre each piece, and import them back into unreal, this didn't take too long, but once again annoyingly I had to spend another 2 1/2 hours waiting for unreal to auto correct the collision boundaries on each piece.  Finally on late Thursday evening I was able to start on building the level.

On Friday I was able to finish the level design for the track and now was waiting on Georgia's buildings to add a cityscape environment, as well as everyone else's work that would be added to the game.  Still waiting for people to send me their work I added the pickup boosts and flame effects to areas of the track I thought best suited it I also added in a day/night cycle blueprint setting the night time to be the majority of the sky, this also added a unique and effect glow to the track pieces which we may leave be depending on how the colour for the track will look next week.  In the afternoon I received Georgia's building which I began to add to the game, however I was only able to do the first portion of the track due to the media labs closing early on Friday's. Next week I plan to finish the level design and hopefully have some environment backgrounds to make it look busy.  

 

Concept Art:

These pieces of work where done while waiting for the auto collision correction to finish.

To add some variety I drew these quick sketches of my vehicle designs in motion, which could also be used as reference sheets for the 3D modellers, but mainly just used to see what the cars would be like in action.

Using one of the sketches I decided to make a start menu, because I had heard nothing about anyone making a start menu, giving the car's and road a basic colour.  Next adding the building where the text would go, adding in a barrier and giving the two cars shadows and highlights.  After that creating sparks and boost effect to show some dynamic to the piece, coming after that was the background which was simply done by lowering the opacity on the road to make it long see through, and duplicating the main building and adding bright colour variations in places to show neon billboards.  Finally adding in the text on the main building chosen from the UI text piece I did last week.  Afterwards I took the piece into Unreal and adding play and quit images to act as the actual buttons which wasn't too difficult, I removed the old text box and replaced it with an image box.  For an hour's work not bad.

I started working on the level complete design where I drew out the layout of the piece, before seeing that unreal had finished all it's auto corrects, so I'm leaving this piece till after I finish the level design.

Strengths & Weaknesses:

My strengths this week where defiantly getting the main blueprints to work, and create a track for our piece, while the building environments still need to be placed I don't see that taking too long and hopefully the game will be finished by Monday or Tuesday latest.

The weaknesses is that there was so much time wasted on simple errors and the annoying auto correct took up basically an entire day.  Not to mention that the team barely turns up or contributes to the actual game work, I sent out a message on Wednesday morning urgently asking them to send me any and all work they had done by Thursday (I never received any work except for Georgia's buildings) I met Scott, the environment artist, on Thursday where I told him that I needed his environments now, he said he'd have them done that evening, then turns around and says he'll have them done by Monday or Tuesday.

The biggest problem on this project is the fact the group is never in or barely shows effort towards working on this project, at this point I can only rely on Georgia to help out.