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Evaluation

Apart from the fact that I can literally no longer open my game- I am really happy with how the game came out and the mechanics that I was able to create and execute. I was able to create a game with a strong art direction, it had an original weapon, all original assets and cool glowing things which is what I was going for from the very start. Albeit the game did not turn out in any way how I envisioned in the start, it’s a lot better than I had initially imagined it would be. The menus and HUD went through about 5 different styles but the one I have now I’m happy with. I have enjoyed 3D Work 1000X more than I thought I would- because I’ve always done 2D art be it cartoons or pixel art it was a bit daunting going into 3D Art and 3D Modelling but the help I got and the lessons have been amazing so that I was able to go from someone who knew absolutely nothing about 3D to someone who has created a game IN 3D. I’d even say that I would definitely happily create another 3D Game.

I feel like my main drawback in this project was that a lot of the things I wanted to do hadn’t been taught and/or included AI components which the teachers aren’t really that confident in so I had to use a lot of YouTube tutorials which resulted in me doing a lot of things that I didn’t fully understand and therefore I wasn’t able to explain it fully in my blogs and I doubt I’d be able to do again in another project from the top of my head like I could the things I was taught in lessons. But apart from that the only other issue is that Unreal seems to really not like my project as it would crash a lot and/or be very slow but that’s more something that I hope is due to outside issues we can’t control.

If I were to to another 3D Game, I would 100% use Voxel for the graphics as I just love how it looks seeing all of the art and the possibilities that arise from the software. I feel like I’d be able to achieve so much more, visually, using Voxel than I would in Maya or Blender. I’d also like to spend more time on music and sound effects for the game as that’s something I feel my game is lacking so I will definitely explore that more in future games and definitely in the Arcade project we have coming up next.

So overall, this project has been super enjoyable and I’m happy with the level of skill that I’m at now as I never imagined that I’d be able to create a 3D Game in my life as all I had worked on in the past were 2D Sidescrollers even before college. This project has shown me just how powerful Unreal is and how many different types of projects you can create within it.

[fpsfinjohnbaptiste]

3D Work Presented on Design Boards

As you can see, they’re usually presented on a simple dark or light background and all angles of the ‘thing’ are shown usually with labels and diagrams

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48. 3D Modelling - What is Arnold?

Arnold is Maya’s default renderer and is used in other 3D Modelling software. It’s a physically based renderer meaning it uses Math to determine where the light is coming from and render it out depending on the output based on the sky.

Here are some examples or renders that used Arnold:

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Tools in Photoshop

Marquee Tool

The Marquee Tool allows you to create selections out of basic shapes such as triangles, squares, circles and more. It’s probably one of the most useful tools in Photoshop

Lasso Tool

The Lasso Tool allows you to use a pen-like tool to ‘circle’ around an object and then create a section from that enclosed shape- it allows for more specific selection

Magic Wand Tool

This tool will basically select everything connected to the pixel you selected that is near 30 or so colours (this number can be changed in the tolerance parameter). It works in a ‘flood’ mechanic so if there is a strip of blue between two sections of red it won’t select the section of red on the other side of the blue strip as they’re not connected to any of the selected pixels

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47. 3D Modelling - Container

I have created a moodboard to help me decide what goes onto a container to make it seem more realistic

We were tasked with creating a UV Map for a container based on the contents of the books we were given in class. So of course the first thing I did was grab the container model we were supplied with and exported the UV for it to Photoshop

Here’s the container^

When in Photoshop, I added some textures and spray paint to the UVs and then reimported them into Maya

And here’s the container in Maya with my additions and the UV texture view on and below is the render

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46. Voxel Games Reaserch

Crossy Road

This style works so well with small arcade mobile games as it’s really recognizable and therefore will make people think of your game when they see anything blocky. It works especially well with this game as it’s from an angle that really makes this style shine and the simple mechanics of jumping in 4 directions benefits from a cube-y style too.

Fugl

Fugl is a game that takes the blocky style and runs with it. The developers have managed to create really detailed looking landscapes and worlds with simple cubes by changing the colour and saturation ever so slightly to replicate light hitting the objects at certain angles. Of course the use of shadow and fog in the background helps too but the sheer detail of what was managed to be created with just cubes is amazing. I love games with a strong art direction/style so this game caught my eye immediately and it’s definitely one I’ll be playing.

Skies of the Past

This game looks amazing as well. It has more of a lowpoly feel than Fugl purely because there are less differing colours and number of cubes used in each individual object but the strong shading and lights make the game look amazing. It’s things like this that really show how powerful simple tools like Voxel can be when you use them right. It’s also so easy to create and a lot less time consuming than creating everything in Maya with intricate detail.

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Examples of artwork made in Voxel

These artists have used cubes that are probably hundreds of little cubes big and were able to cut out a corner to create these small isometric worlds. The way that there are such small details as 3 or 4 cubes are cut out of certain sections and added on in certain parts helps to slowly build this huge creation that looks amazing. I think I would definitely have used this to build my world if I had seen this tool before starting this project and I hope to get a chance to use it again in the future.

[fpsfinjohnbaptiste]

Examples of UVs in Game Development

This one isn’t really a specific game but it shows how most humans and even monsters in games are created. It would take months and months in games like GTA where there are people everywhere to make each individual person with this much detail and colour. So UV maps are made widespread and all the developers have to do is get the meshes for the people and add the UVs to them to save loads of time and it still looks just as good.

The payloads in Overwatch are just whiteboxed meshes with a UV on top of them- the UV would probably look very random but the person making them obviously know what everything is going to look like. There’s also a chance that this one model is made of multiple UVs for the different objects on top of the payload and the box or coins.

Rope in games like Assassins' Creed are just sheets of invisible boxes with rope texutes on them and UV maps to make them look like rope bundles. The black and white images determine what parts of the UV will be bevelled and which parts will dip in. All of this helps to make the texture seem as realistic as possible.

Here’s an example of UVs in objects such as doors.

You can see that instead of having hundreds of lamberts and textures and intricately designing every dip and scratch in these objects, you can simply create some shapes and apply UV maps to them to make them look way more detailed than they actually are.

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45. 3D Modelling - Creating a can with UV Maps

I had already made a can but it got lost in my files so here I’ve created an example can

I started off by creating a cylinder and resizing it so it looked more like a can shape

I then extruded and pinched the top of the can to get that slanted effect on the top of cans

Then, I brought up the UV Viewer and sorted out all of the UVs so I could easily edit them in Photoshop

And then in photoshop I just drew some random things on the can to represent how it will work

And here’s the can in Maya after I selected the file I made ‘can.png’ as the colour for the lambert and went into the ‘textured’ view.

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44. 3D Modelling - Ammo Pickup (DEVELOPMENT)

As my weapon in the game is a gun that shoots out of it’s mouth and my player character is a skeleton I thought it would make sense to make my ammo pickup a tooth and have the gun shoot teeth

I started by creating a platonic as when molded ends up looking quite ‘lowpoly’ and it’s been the starting mesh for all of my 3D objects

I then made four of them and placed them like so to resemble the bumps at the bottom of a molar tooth

Then, I selected four of the vertices at the bottom of the platonic shapes and simple dragged them down to create this tooth. I then applied a creamy lambert to it and imported it as a .FBX file into Unreal.

[fpsfinjohnbaptiste]

43. Game Environment Research

Genshin Impact

The game’s level design is very much an Open World Game where the player has a number of quests and tasks to do. The world reflects that well as the developers can put less time into the quests themselves as the journey to each waypoint takes 15-20 minutes anyway.

The ‘isekai anime’ aesthetic of the whole game also helps the level feel like its really a part of the game and fits in it well. It also helps the game to feel much bigger than it actually is. The only problem I have with the game’s level design is that it’s easy to get ‘lost’. I don’t mean as you don’t know where you are but a lot of the areas in the game blend together as it all does look very much the same. So my only thing that could make it better is if there were more areas that stood out so the player could make mental waypoints to position themselves.

I’d like to take some of the ways that the game positions things like trees, rocks and other ‘foliage’ types around its world and incorporate them into my game as they seem really realistic and that’s something I’ve been struggling with.

Subnautica

I am a big fan of Subnautica’s world design. The company already had an easier job to make the world intriguing as soon as they decided to make it take place underwater. Having the world set on an alien world as well allows them to take the themes of coral reefs and add glowing sections, moving parts and abstract colours to make everything look really pretty and it made it an exciting adventure when you were traversing the underwater caverns and coral reefs. 

This, combined with the amazing atmospheric sound effects does a great job of immersing the player in the game and making them look behind and around them to ensure they didn’t miss anything or there isn’t something chasing them. I know when I played this game I pretty much spent 80% of the game just swimming around trying to find cool areas.

The main thing I’ve taken away from this game is it’s use of emissive textures and how the whole world glows when the sun goes down. It helps to make just swimming around somehow enjoyable and as my game consists of just killing ghosts- this is something I could really take notes from.

Firewatch

This is a game that I haven’t really played but just from seeing the art and screenshots of the game the art style is really interesting. There’s of course the apparent realism of the whole world, as you’re travelling around this forest but there’s also this subtle cartoon aspect in the skybox mostly but also a, what I’m gonna call an Overlay on top of the camera that makes everything look a tiny bit more stylized and saturated.

This game has more of a calm tone as there aren’t any massive shootouts or boss battles and the calm setting of the level really emphasizes that. The game looks like it takes place in late autumn/winter  and the soft blowing wind and leaf sound effects around the player really makes you feel like you’re there as it’s so realistic. This game wouldn’t have caught my eye if it wasn’t for the cool style that it has as games that are super realistic don’t really appeal to me.

I’d like to incorporate more environmental sound effects and ambience into my game and this one looks like it nails that aspect. Also the use of foliage is something I can definitely take away from.

[fpsfinjohnbaptiste]

Level Design Moodboard

:)

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42. Unreal - Auto Landscape Painting and Heightmaps

This type of texture for the landscapes uses Heightmaps. Heightmaps are images that represent what height everything on the map is- for example black is the highest possible point and white is the lowest possible point and the different shades of grey in between are all of the heights in between

This is an example of a heightmap. These can be imported into Unreal and applied to landscapes to ‘automatically’ create a dynamic map efficiently.

The auto landscape texture will refer to the heightmap that, either you imported or the one that is generated whenever you manipulate your map with the landscape tool and change the colour or texture depending on the height. So it will see if the height is bigger than x or smaller than x and depending on the output it will make the lower textures rock or mud and the higher ones grass.

This is really useful as it saves loads of time painting each location on a landscape so you can focus more on how the map works and simply apply a texture like this and it will do all of the work for you. Of course for some maps (such as mine) this wouldn’t work as they may be more stylized or there’s a certain look a developer wants that this method couldn’t achieve. 

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41. Unreal - Foliage

In Unreal, there’s a foliage tool which lets you paint down meshes that have no collision

Here, I imported some tree trunks and some pieces of grass and plants to paint down

You can change the density of the foliage, obviously for things like mushrooms or logs the density would be very low and for grass and plants the density would be much higher.

This tool is really useful for painting down more dynamic surroundings without having millions of actors which would slow the game down as the foliage tool uses mesh-types instead of actors.

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40. Unreal - Creating a menu (DEVELOPMENT)

I wanted to create a simple menu where the player could enter or quit the game from the title screen. I’m planning on adding some controls in the corner but for now you can just scroll through the options

I made an animation for the background where it would fade between colours slowly and then back to it’s original colour. This wasn’t very hard to do as I just had to change the colour at each keyframe and Unreal would do the work for me

I then simply had to add the PlayAnimation node to the event construct and set the number of loops to 0 so it would play infinitley and halved the playback speed.

I added two buttons and set their normal, hovered and clicked states to images I made in Photoshop (which is the play and quit text that’s above) and this worked. However I ran into an issue when I wanted to add in a controller- I couldn’t control the main menu at all as there were no nodes in the event graph that allowed me to change the image of the button. Eventually, I decided I was going to completely abandon the idea of using a mouse and have the game as controller only. This way I could have the controller use the main menu, this is a lot easier than trying to code in the use of controller and mouse and keyboard for now.

The first thing I had to do was create a variable which would indicate what menu option was currently selected. Then, I made a check to see if the stick was being moved up or down and depending on the output I either added one (for up) or took one away (for down). 

Next, I plugged the variable into a switch node, this would see if the variable was 1 or 0 and do something accordingly. If it was 0, this meant that PLAY should be selected so I set both of the images to their unselected versions and then turned PLAY to it’s selected version and then the same for if it was 1- I made the QUIT button white

Then, to actually be able to use the buttons, I checked to see if A had been pressed on the controller and if it had, it would check to see if the MenuSelector variable was 1 or 0 (so if the player was trying to play or quit) and if they were on play, it would play the click sound and open the level- if they were on quit it would play a click sound and exit the game.

All of this code allowed me to create a simple Main Menu that will open when the game starts

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39. Unreal - Opening Doorway (DEVELOPMENT)

Obviously, I needed some kind of goal in the game and, because of time, I decided to have the player kill 30 ghosts before the door opened and then they kill a boss inside of the temple to win

The code for it is basically asking if the player has killed 30 ghosts or more and if so tell the player using a widget that the door has opened, play a boom sound and then destroy themselves

The door itself is just a simple black cube that will disappear after 30 ghosts are killed

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I’ve decided to have a neutral grey background for the background of the ammo and health pickups because I used purple for the gun as the gun is purple but as the pickups are different colours, I thought they’d pop more if they were in front of a bland background.

The Colgaid is supposed to be toothpaste that heals the player and there is a small plus icon floating around inside of the seethrough tube. The ammo is a tooth as the player is a skeleton and the gun has a mouth so it made sense- also I wanted something different to traditional bullets as my game isn’t really that ‘normal’.