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Voxels in the games industry

I'm researching voxels in the games industry as I used voxels to model all of my assets in this project.

Games:

Minecraft Is the first game that comes to most peoples minds when you think of the cube modelling software. Voxels are used in every aspect in this game with the surrounding environment, mobs, player model, tools etc.

Minecraft is a key example of how games can be uniquely modelled. I've always thought modelling with voxels looks unprofessional but then think of how Minecraft has utilised voxels.

Teardown:

Teardown is another fairly popular voxel game where the multiple levels it offers are entirely built out of voxels, just like Minecraft, however every bit can be destroyed/interacted with.

Yet again every model in the game is modelled using voxels. I have not yet tried level designing with voxels but due to me having used the modelling engine so it's definitely a possibility in the future.

Bonfire peaks:

Bonfire peaks is a voxel puzzle game that is also completely modelled using voxels. Your aim is to navigate puzzles to let go of your past and burn your belongings. I can't say that I have heard of this game before but after researching it, it has been recognised as another influential voxel-modelled game.

After researching these three games I cannot wait until I decide to use voxels to model the entire game. This will of course need more research but hopefully I am able to achieve this.

Voxel artists:

Mari:

Mari is a voxel artist I found on the website ArtStation. She has made an overwhelming amount of fantastic landscape scenes and recreations of amazing architecture whilst combining the use of shaders and voxels. Whilst viewing these pieces of artwork you can see the amount of detail and effort put into each of these pieces. Voxels can be used in many instances with art being one of them.

John Kearney:

John Kearney is another artist I found on ArtStation who appears to be an Art Director. He has a mixture of both voxel and regular artwork with some being for a game called fire fu. He also has a few 3d model art. Focusing on the voxel side of his art, He mainly does voxel art set in a cyberpunk setting. Yet again his work is inspiring through the use of shaders and skillful modelling.

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5 games that use data tables.

Borderlands:

Borderlands is an action role playing video game that is set in a western space fantasy. Each 'level' in this game is made by hand, the weapons however are randomly dropped.  The statistics of the equipment, such as the amount of damage and accuracy for a gun and special elemental attacks, are procedurally generated as well as the drop rate. This allows the series to be replayed if the player wants certain stats on a weapon.

These weapons stats are also made from a data table created with the same purpose as the procedural generation. Data tables are often used to showcase the stats of the weapon.

Titanfall 2:

In Titanfall 2, players control Titans, mecha-style exoskeletons and their pilots, who are agile and equipped with a variety of skills ranging from wall-running to cloaking. It offers two gamemodes, The campaign and mulitplayer. In the multiplayer you are able to cutomise your pilot's loadout with each weapons having stats referring to the fire rate, damage, mag size etc. In the campaign you are able to customise the weapon your titan wields. This also changes the abilities of your titan. On the selection screen it informs you of the damage, mag size, difficulty of the kit and the titan the weapon is from.

Skyrim:

Skyrim is set 200 years after the events of Oblivion and takes place in Skyrim, the northernmost province of Tamriel, a continent on the planet Nirn. Its main story focuses on the player's character, the Dragonborn, on their quest to defeat Alduin the World-Eater, a dragon who is prophesied to destroy the world. Over the course of the game, the player completes quests and develops the character by improving skills. The game continues the open world tradition of its predecessors by allowing the player to travel anywhere in the game world at any time, and to ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely. In skyrim you are able to customise your armour, skill trees, and special items. Each of these have different stats presented in a data table to give the player and understanding of how good a piece of equipment is.

Elden ring:

Elden Ring is presented through a third-person perspective; players freely roam its interactive open world. The six main areas are traversed using the player character's steed Torrent as the primary mode of travel. Hidden dungeons can be explored to find useful items. Players can use several types of weapons and magic spells, including non-direct engagement enabled by stealth mechanics. Throughout the game's world, checkpoints enable fast travel and allow players to improve their attributes using an in-game currency called Runes. Elden Ring has an online multiplayer mode in which players can join each other for cooperative and player-versus-player combat. In Elden Ring you are able to manipulate your base stats making you either very strong at melee or very strong at spells as two examples. These stats are presented in a data table as a tracker for the player's stats.

Enter the Gungeon:

Enter the Gungeon is a 2016 bullet hell roguelike game developed by Dodge Roll and published by Devolver Digital. Set in the firearms-themed Gungeon, gameplay follows four player characters called Gungeoneers as they traverse procedurally generated rooms to find a gun that can "kill the past". The Gungeoneers fight against bullet-shaped enemies, which are fought using both conventional and exotic weapons. Enter the Gungeon features a permadeath system, causing the Gungeoneers to lose all obtained items and start again from the first level upon death. Between playthroughs, players can travel to an area called the Breach, where they can converse with non-player characters and unlock new items randomly encountered while playing. Whilst the player traverses the level you are able to get items or guns from chests that require a key to be opened and boss loot drops. You keep these items until you either swap them out or die. The items are presented in a data table that lies in the menu, from here you are able to check the stats and description letting the player know the function.

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Gameplay video

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play testing

As of this moment in time I was only able to get two people to play test this project, both of these were well received reviews of my game one even claiming they thought my sequence was stolen from a professional area.

FINAL PLAYTEST

With a larger range of reviews I am able to see an average rating for the game and what most people would like to be added.

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Targets for week of 9.10.23

Complete empty blogs

Get screenshots onto processes blog

add sfx

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Roulette system

The roulette system is a very long strain of code in this project so I will cover it in smaller screenshots.

At first the custom event would just spawn the items but I made it so it showed a bunch of the random items before giving you the one you earnt.

The custom event now checks if roulette equals true as soon as it's activated. It then shares a branch with a retrigger which mainly supports the roulette and not the initial spawning. After this the spawn actor is called and it applies one of the 10 models inserted into the array with a random integer plugged in to ensure it's completely random.

This bit of code sets the number of cycles of the roulette system. For my lootbox it's set to 60 cycles and it goes through each object every 0.005 seconds so that the 60 cycles are gone through at a fast pace. The spawn system spawns in the confetti which will be explained in another blog post.

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Opening the lootbox

I coded it so when the 'E' key is pressed it goes through the sequence and removes the 'press E for lootbox' widget that is applied when the game starts so it doesn't obstruct the sequence. The sequence lasts 4 seconds so there's a delay for 4 seconds befopre the lootbox spawns the items through a custom event. This custom event was made during the spawning problem blog on this tumblr to tidy up the ever growing code.

(note this is an old screenshot as more code has been added to the custom event for a roulette system.)

The custom event lets the randomised spawning of the models I created be called without having to set the whole thing up again, making the code more tidy in the necessary parts.

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Trading card games

Adventure time Card Wars:

Card Wars is the fourteenth episode of the fourth season of the American animated television series Adventure Time. It originally aired on Cartoon Network on July 16, 2012.

On February 16, 2014, a mobile app version of the game developed by Kung Fu Factory was released that expanded the original premise of the show to create additional storylines, characters, creatures and environments while further developing the gameplay rules. The app itself dismayed critics due to its in-app purchases, however, proved popular on the app store rising to #1 in the top paid apps.

Pokemon cards:

The Pokémon Trading Card Game was developed in Japan, based on the 1996 Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow Game Boy video game by Nintendo. It was first published in October 1996 by Media Factory in Japan. In the US, it was first published by Wizards of the Coast, towards the end of 1998 to capitalize on the US popularity of Pokémon. Over the next five years, Wizards of the Coast published more than a dozen expansion sets for the game, allowing the company to sell millions of cards and make more money from Pokémon than they had made from Magic: The Gathering in its first 10 years.

Magic the gathering:

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a tabletop and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast; Magic was the first trading card game and had approximately thirty-five million players as of December 2018, and over twenty billion Magic cards were produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity.

A player in Magic takes the role of a Planeswalker, a powerful wizard who can travel between dimensions of the Multiverse, doing battle with other players as Planeswalkers by casting spells, using artifacts, and summoning creatures as depicted on individual cards drawn from their individual decks. A player defeats their opponent typically by casting spells and attacking with creatures to deal damage to the opponent's "life total", with the objective being to reduce it from 20 to 0, or 40 to 0 in some group formats.

MARVEL Snap:

Marvel Snap is a digital collectible card game developed by Second Dinner and published by Nuverse for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. The game features a collection of different characters from the Marvel Universe.

Players each have a deck of 12 cards. Each card depicts a Marvel character with cost, power level, and potentially a special ability. At the start of each round, players simultaneously put one card or more face down on one of three locations. Locations are randomly assigned for each match, and each location has a unique effect. At the end of each round cards are revealed and special abilities of cards trigger. Whoever has the highest power at a given location wins that location.

Adrenalyn XL:

Adrenalyn XL is a football trading card game produced by Panini. In 2010 they featured 22 of the 32 FIFA World Cup 2010 teams. The England players show only the player's heads and say England Superstar on them. There are 18 England Cards and they have 3 Champions Cards. There are 350 Cards. There are 250 Base Cards, 25 Star Players, 25 Goal Stoppers, 25 Fan's Favourites and 25 Champions. Each card has a rating in attack and defense there is also an overall rating the players are rated out of 100.

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Level sequence

I wanted my lootbox to have a small introduction before it opened for the first time. We covered level sequences in a workshop and I used this knowledge to apply it to my own project.

This node was the main thing to get it working code wise. All it needed was the level sequence blueprint to be used as the level sequence reference and it would work without breaking.

This is where I plotted the keyframes for the sequence. I moved a cinematic camera around the box, creating keyframes from where I wanted the camera to move. At this point in time a couple of the keyframes need to be redone but it can stay for the time being.

I also made it so the camera stays possessed after the sequence has finished meaning that when you're opening the lootbox it plays right from where it stopped.

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Niagara effects

I followed this tutorial to assist me with the particle effects as I have only ever used the niagara effects once. The tutorial showed me how to manipulate the confetti base provided by unreal but I changed the mesh and the amount of confetti particles spawned.

I also created another confetti niagara blueprint except i swapped out the mesh with a parameter. This parameter then allowed me to code it so it would spawn in the model of the item you acquired from the lootbox.

This is what the effects look like:

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5 games that use procedural generation

Deep rock galactic:

Deep rock galactic is a co op dwarf mining game that consists of many game modes where you have to mine or extract alien materials and bring them home where management sells them. The caves your drill pod enters is never the same, it is procedurally generated with spider like creatures trying to kill you.

Procedural generation is often used in games like these so that despite you have the same objective, the level design is completely unique offering a different experience each time.

The binding of isaac:

Binding of Isaac is a rogue like video game in which you traverse through dungeons whilst defeating enemies and collecting powerups. These dungeons are randomly generated each time meaning that the player will never have the same run twice. Each power up can change your appearance and the amount of tears you can shoot plus new abilities.

Minesweeper:

Minesweeper was released in 1990 by Microsoft for the Microsoft entertainment pack in Windows 3.1. The game requires you to correctly flag all the bombs and revealing all squares without clicking on one of the bombs. The location of the bombs are randomly generated every game you play meaning you cannot memorise the locations.

Borderlands:

Borderlands is an action role playing video game that is set in a western space fantasy. Each 'level' in this game is made by hand, the weapons however are randomly dropped.  The statistics of the equipment, such as the amount of damage and accuracy for a gun and special elemental attacks, are procedurally generated as well as the drop rate. This allows the series to be replayed if the player wants certain stats on a weapon.

No man's sky:

No man's sky is an action adventure video game in which you are able to travel across the universe and visit alien planets. The game focuses on survival, combat, house building, and trading. The game is heavily praised for its massive procedural generated universe with reportedly 18 quintillion planets to explore making it near impossible for players to experience the same landscape and wildlife.

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Are lootboxes considered gambling?

This question has been floating around the games industry for quite some time. It mainly concerns the influence of younger players spending money on lootbox type products.

One might argue that it isn't gambling since you're guaranteed to receive a reward, this is true. Practically every game will give you a reward regardless if you didn't get what you wanted since there's a loot pool, whereas in casino games you can win nothing and lose your bet.

Another person may argue that since you're spending real money to get a cosmetic item that has a small chance of dropping, encouraging the player to spend more in order to get their desired item. Some mobile games reward you with a free summon if you open it a certain amount of time- furthermore encouraging the player to keep spending money.

Recent articles have acknowledged lootboxes a 'game of chance' which officially makes lootboxes gambling. The link comes from the psychological impact it has on all age groups, encouraging players to either keep playing or, spend more real life money.

Here's a video covering the topic:

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The spawning problem.

After the video sequence was complete I needed a way that would spawn the item in the game to test how it worked. Somehow this took over two weeks to work as I didn't have another idea on how to get it to spawn in.

At first I coded it so that when you pressed 'p' it would spawn a random actor in the array I had created.

I then decided to add the code to the sequence so that it would happen straight after (for now.)

This strain went through many changes, I even created a custom event to tidy the code up as it was starting to get messy.

As you can tell from the screenshots, the code for each attempt is similar as this was the only way I could think of doing this myself. After attempting many times I was starting to get worried.

I then went onto blueprint.ue and found one of three blueprints for a lootbox. I replaced the variables so it would apply to this lootbox instead of the one it was linked to.

But then even this didn't work and I was left wondering how I was going to do this lootbox since I had tried hard and it had only resulted in failure, but then I found it.

A very small and frankly easy mistake, was not linking up a random integer to the array. Once this discovery was made I set up a tick to test.

As soon as the game was played the actors would spawn in on tick successfully meaning that I was finally out of the drought of being unable to spawn my models in.

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Targets for 25.9.23

Continue modelling Stephen's belongings.

Model the actual lootbox.

Do processes blog

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Dice rolling games

Baldur's Gate 3:

Baldur's Gate 3 is a role-playing video game with a single-player and cooperative multiplayer element. Players can create one or more characters and form a party along with a number of pre-generated characters to explore the game's story. Optionally, players are able to take one of their characters and team up online with other players to form a party. Unlike previous games in the Baldur's gate series, Baldur's gate 3 has turn-based combat, similar to Larian's earlier games Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin II; all combat is based on the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules.

Monopoly:

Monopoly is a multi-player economics-themed board game. In the game, players roll two dice to move around the game board, buying and trading properties and developing them with houses and hotels. Players collect rent from their opponents and aim to drive them into bankruptcy. Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards and tax squares. Players receive a salary every time they pass "Go" and can end up in jail, from which they cannot move until they have met one of three conditions. House rules, hundreds of different editions, many spin-offs, and related media exist. Monopoly has become a part of international popular culture.

Mario party:

Every game in the main series has a standard Party Mode in which up to four players play through a board, trying to collect as many stars as possible. In every turn, each player rolls a die and progresses on the board, which usually has branching paths. Coins are primarily earned by performing well in a minigame played at the end of each turn. On most boards, players earn stars by reaching a star space and purchasing a star for a certain amount of coins. The star space appears randomly on one of several pre-determined locations and moves every time a star is purchased, usually occupying a blue space. On some boards, the star location is fixed.  Every Mario Party game contains at least 50 to 100 minigames with a few different types.

Dungeons and dragons:

Dungeons & Dragons (sometimes abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game. D&D departs from traditional wargaming by allowing each player to create their own character to play instead of a military formation. These characters embark upon adventures within a fantasy setting. A Dungeon Master serves as the game's referee and storyteller, while maintaining the setting in which the adventures occur, and playing the role of the inhabitants of the game world, known as non-player characters. The characters form a party and they interact with the setting's inhabitants and each other. Together they solve problems, engage in battles, explore, and gather treasure and knowledge. In the process, player characters earn experience points to level up, and become increasingly powerful over a series of separate gaming sessions. Players choose a class when they create their character, which gives them special perks and abilities every few levels.

Snakes and ladders:

Snakes and ladders is a board game for two or more players regarded today as a worldwide classic. The game originated in ancient India as Moksha Patam, and was brought to the UK in the 1890s. It is played on a game board with numbered, gridded squares. A number of ladders and snakes are pictured on the board, each connecting two specific board squares. The object of the game is to navigate one's game piece, according to die rolls, from the start (bottom square) to the finish (top square), helped by climbing ladders but hindered by falling down snakes. It is a race against luck.

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Endless runner games

Subway surfers:

Subway surfers is an endless runner game where you are doing graffiti in the subway and the security/police officer starts chasing you and you have to avoid obstacles such as trains, stop signs, barriers, platforms etc. You are able to collect coins in the level which you can then use to upgrade powerups that can be found on a run.

Minion rush:

Minion rush is an endless runner game where you play as a minion as you just run through the customisable locations to collect as many bananas as you can and get a highscore without hitting into any obstacles.

Pac-Man 256:

Pacman 256 is an endless version of the classic pacman arcade game. The layout is randomised and there's ghosts roaming the level but you can also eat pellets and power pellets to assist getting rid of them. Eliminating a ghost will also give you some bonus points. Whilst the game is going on the bottom of the level is decaying, you have to run away from both the 'glitch' and the ghosts whilst aiming for a highscore.

Temple run:

Temple run is an endless runner where you steal an artifact within the jungle and are then chased by the beast protecting it. You traverse the jungle through ruins and zipwires whilst collecting coins that can be spent on upgrades. You have to avoid tree roots and pits in the ruins so you don't slow down and get caught by the beast.

Jetpack Joyride:

Jetpack Joyride is an endless runner where the player controls Barry as he traverses a lab after stealing a machine gun jetpack. You have to fly over lasers and dodge missiles whilst collecting coins and getting a highscore. There's power ups throughout the level that have different abilities, they also allow you to take a hit without dying but you will lose the power up. You can also collect the letters S.A.M to create the SAM machine which is a big mech that allows you to deflect the missiles.