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.