stpid-machine

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 6

Final day! The feedback I recieved was mostly positive, and the things that needed improving were fortunately not super time consuming. A lot of it was things like tweaking the animations on the transition UI, adjusting dialogue in places to make it feel more natural and so on.

One common theme in feedback was that the right hand side of the level was too dull, and there wasn't really anything that happened between the start and end of that path. With limited time remaining, I decided that the most efficient thing to do would be to try and tell a bit of environmental storytelling and re-use some assets.

I decided to add another broken down car in here to provoke the idea that the player isn't the first person to be lured into the forest by the monster/woodsman. I also added a large number of tin cans lying around and some destroyed lamp posts to try and make it look as if the monster had torn them down to make the right hand side less appealing to the player. This was a decision that stemmed from originally having two endings, so is a little bit odd without that context when playing.

Final build was compiled without issue, so i'll be submitting and seeing what the feedback is.

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 5

Bit of a rushed post as i've been at work all day and have limited time left, but today I finished off the final cutscene with some sound FX and got it working with the level transitions I added.

I also finished the story and level implementation across the level. I'm not super happy with how this turned out as I wasn't really sure what story I wanted to tell, but it sort of works so i'm happy with it for now.

I also managed to get my first build today, and passed it off to some of my peers for feedback. I can hopefully do some final polish with the feedback tomorrow evening before submission.

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 4

I was back at work today so didn't have as much time to work on it as I normally do. Regardless, I got a lot of content into the game, but was unable to put in the same level of polish I normally do due to time constraints. One of these was finishing up the logic for the final sequence once the player makes it to the shack.

There were a few challenges involved with this, namely trying to use my dialogue system to sequence animations at the same time as running a conversation. Fortunately I found a hacky way around it that didn't require me to spend too much time changing the logic.

For this final sequence I also worked on two animations for the monster that I don't particularly want to spoil, so you'll have to play to see those. Artwork for the shack and door was also created and implemented alongside the final sequence. As this was the last bit of the level, I finished off the map and level design as well.

Another addition today was a new tree mesh that can add a bit of variation to the trees. I also adjusted the tree material to apply some SimpleGrassWind effects to the world position offset output. This uses the green vertex colour channel on the tree meshes, meaning the tops of the trees sway in the wind a little bit.

The final item for today was some audio ambience to bring the forest environment to life and help flesh out the tree wind movement.

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 3

Biiiig progress. Spent a lot of today doing environment art and trying to make the atmospheric horror element a bit more impactful. Think i'm getting there.

Made some nice trees today, and built a couple of actors that can place clumps of them with random textures for variation and some (clamped) random scaling as well. I've always stayed away from trees but this time decided to take in the retro element of the jam and make some old school trees. These are effectively just a plane with a few extra faces, then textured and stacked up on top of each other to help with depth.

I also modelled and animated the monster today. This was a learning experience and outside of my comfort zone as i've never modelled, rigged and animated a basic humanoid before. I also modelled some clothes for it which was something new to me as well. Will probably touch up the textures later on in the week to try and make it a bit more unsettling but i'm happy with it for now. I feel like it looks kind of goofy static but I don't want to spoil too much of it before the game is playable.

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 2

Lots of progress today. Started by finishing off the player character with:

- Added support for Widget Interaction. This lets the player interact with UI in the world, which makes for a much more dynamic experience. - Footsteps. Set these up with the camera bobbing to select a random sound based on what kind of surface we're standing on. Currently have Grass, Mud, Dirt/Rock, Wood.

I then worked on the level blockout. To help with this, I decided it'd be good to get some of the atmospheric effects in such as fog and the skybox. I also setup a landscape material to support the footstep sounds and their accompanying physical materials.

After testing a few times to make sure it'll take between 5-10 mins to move through with stops at the conversation points, I went ahead with implementing the dialogue system and the actors that will be using it.

This was probably the lengthiest part of today, as it's been a while since I set something like this up. This time around I decided to try and make it as flexible as possible for myself as a designer, and try and keep it easily transferable to other projects.

To do this, I set it up as scene component that can create the widget component in world space, and push updates to the dialogue based on the players inputs. The actual dialogue information is stored in a data table, which means it can be modified externally in excel via the .csv format.

As i'm writing this, it may have been better to just remove the extra step up to the scene component and put all the logic on a widget component. Next time!

Once I had verified that it all worked, I spent some time working on art and made one of the props required for the game.

[stpid-machine]

Retro Horror Jam - Day 1

Good start to the day, I've come up with what I think is a solid idea that follows the theme but pushes it a bit out of the box.

Spent most of today drawing up a plan of attack for the weekend, with the aim of a finished loop and assets by monday, so that I can spend monday to thursday bugfixing and adding little bits of juice.

I put together a quick design doc from my template just to get my idea a bit more thought out. This can be viewed here.

I've not made a horror game before and haven't played much, so this might be quite a learning experience.

From a technical standpoint, i've ended today by setting up the Unreal project and creating a character that uses the Enhanced Input system, which is something i've not used before. Learning the system didn't take long and I can already see how I can apply it to my ongoing project after the jam has concluded.

Tomorrow i'll be adding some simple camera bobbing and footstep SFX before moving onto a level blockout and building the dialogue system.