voice acting

 

Voice Acting

 

As in other posts you have saw the script i have wrote to be recorded and put in the level but as we began to record the script we soon discovered the difference between people who have never done voice acting before and the pros we only managed to record a small portion of the script basically the first few conversations between the father and his daughter. But with the dialogue being that bad we decided not to use it as it would take away from the games experience where if something dramatic happened in game the reaction from the player would have been wrong and good voice acting is a huge part of a story for a player to get involved in and this is why we decided not to use voice acting in our level.

As i said before in the functions of kismet and matinee this is the best example of how you can animate lights and skeletel meshes as you can see i animated the lights to fade and change colour every time they light back up while the skeletal meshes dance

Functions of the game engine in this project

Game engine functions

 

throughout this project i have been importing, adding materials, bringing my own sounds into udk and generally bringing in everything so in this post i will tell you the methods of how i did this

Importing static meshes

Now most of this will be an artist who would actually make the item in maya, texture it and then give  it the mesh file will be a fbx file to me but i will just talk you throught the way we did it in this project. we imported the items in this project by giving the mesh and its texture separately ( the texture was a psd file from photoshop) once i had it on my usb i could start to import i began this by making a new package for my new project so that they would all save properly after that was set up i  clicked the import button in the content browser found it in my files and selected it to import and it was that simple the only thing to do after that was to import its texture which you would do the same way but you cant add textures to meshes in udk so we had to turn it into a material which is simply done by right clicking on the texture selecting create new material which will make the texture a material so it can then be applied to a mesh this is a very important function of the engine because of the obvious reason that if the engine couldn't do that you would only have already made items which all like sci-fi/grunge so not good if you have any other setting. if you was using and engine like soucre then you would have to use the file type SMD which is more complicated and takes more time but udk has a very simple way to import.

Lighting

Lighting in udk in its most simple form is very easy to grasp as all you have to do to put a light in your game is to hold the L button don't and left click and then there is you re light. When you want to start making more creative lights you cant have a normal white light so udk allows you to easily change the colour, brightness and radius of the light by simply clicking on the light and then hitting F4 to bring up its properties where you can change them all which even a beginner can use this makes lights in udk very simple and effective things for level designers you can also experiment with the colours and brightness of them since it is very simple to understand. When normal lights dont do the job you can animate you lighting to fade in and out to change from colour to colour and even move around the player for this you need a light that is toggleble this basically means you can animate the light you can change a normal light into this by selecting the light right clicking and converting it to a toggleble light. Lighting is a huge part of a game and udk has very good lighting systems that a beginner can use on there first map and a pro could use on there very advanced map and for my level which was a horror level atmosphere is everything so the lighting is key and the engine is that good it easily did what i needed it to to create a dark candle lit atmosphere.

Kismet

kismet is an amazing function that is with udk kismet is what basically makes a game work if there was no kismet you could still make a good level but there would be no animation which would mean no doors would open no npc's would move nothing would really work so kismet is where you set up all of your triggers which will open doors let you pick things up and let you put things in you re inventory it is a huge part of udk which is extremely useful in making an amazing level that will be immerse so that actions will happen around the player. kismat was a huge part of my level i had to have tables move barells roll books to be animated and sounds all this was dont through kismet so could you picture a horror game where nothing moved around you where nothing ghostly was really going on it would be a bad game.

Matinee

Now matinee and kismet really go hand in hand even though kismet lets you see things move the actual animation is done in matinee simple things are done in here like adding a running animation to a skeletal mesh to make him run to a certain place and making an animation for a door to open these are the types of things done in this part of udk but none of these animations would work unless you didn't connect them up tp all your triggers that are in kismet matinee and kismat are easily 2 of the most important thing in udk to make a good level.

Skeletal mesh

Skeletal meshes are basically anything that would be able to walk like a human or animal it is anything that would have a skeleton now in our level there was never going to be any skeletal meshes in the level but i had a little spare time on the day so i decided to put a little easter egg in our level which was a room that was previously locked i took 3 skeletal meshes animate them so they would....erm..they would play the...pelvic thrust animation so it looked like they were dancing while i was doing this i might as well take it further and add music and lighting (as you do) so as the skeletal meshes were practising there pelvic thrust i added lighting and animated it in matinee so it would start off white light then fade away and as it lights up to be a blue light then red so it was like a light that as it dimmed changed colour i also set this to loop so that it never ended and then i added music that played as you walked in the room this is also a good way to show the variety of things you can do in matinee. 

Music/Sounds

importing sounds is the same as importing everything else click import in the content browser select and import but the sound will come in as a sound node wave which are great for background music but cannot be used for things like a door creaking sound since it would play contstanly so you need to convert it to a sound cue so it will only play once and play when it has been told to you do this by right clicking a space in the content and creating new sound cue double click the new sound cue icon and in the sound editor connect the sound node wave icon and connect it to the speaker. Sound in a game is one of the most important things that create atmosphere and even though udk did not have the sounds i wanted it was very simple to import and use them in the level.

The udk engine is a an incredible engine that a beginner can use and that a pro can use the engine lets me do a lot an d i will only learn to do more the more i use the engine           

final thoughts on level

My Final thoughts on the level

 

 

I think that the team of me and 2 others have made a very good level in terms of its looks and it being an entirely team made project by that i mean we used all each others work to make them the walls,floor and everything else was all made by the artists in my group and they both produced very good items for there first time making such items and i also. I think that our level is also very good for a very first team built level working in groups and very good that this is our very first level design project.

 

Over Thinking

I think that for our first project we may have aimed too high in terms of what we wanted the player to do what the story was and the items we said we could make i think that we forgot the core word of this project which was to make a LEVEL of a game and not the game i think we shot for more of fitting an entire story into just one level which isn't really possible examples of this are things like story's and scripts i personally wrote and made for the level i think that i got caught up in thinking that this a full game and not a level to show our design skills

 

Conclusion

In conclusion i think that the team has made a good game with a fun and most importantly a playable level that did stay true to what we wanted in the first place which was a type of amnesia inspired feel. We did at points get caught up in trying to turn thins level into a game which was a bad mistake considering we only had 6 weeks for this project and even worse the first few weeks we couldn't really save our levels without all of our artist made items not being saved essentially leaving designers that had entirely artist made levels so work couldn't begin straight away but this problem was fixed as soon as it could of been so work could begin but i think we have done very good on this project i think we have made a level that will be very enjoyable to play.

Cut backs

 

Cut backs

Due to various reasons over the project i haven't had tome to fully complete the level so when playing the game there may be doors that say they are locked but are actually empty with nothing in them due to time or not having the assets and now instead of having an upstairs area i have decided it would be easier to have a corridor leading to a master bedroom

level design evolution

 

The evolution of our level

like every deign process there is an evolution that will happen to come to the final product this can come across through different things from reasons like the level would be improved by having this change in its layout or changed smaller due to lack of time with our map we have both of these reasons

 

Like most designers who are given a task to make something that actually exists in real life to make it more realistic and ratable i first looked at plans of real schools like this

 

with all these new designs and idea i began to make my own designs from these pictures i leaned that schools are not the most diverse shaped buildings in the world with most the rooms square or rectangular with the entire building following the square rectangular shape this did make it easier to make since it wasn't hard to start sketching simple buildings with square/rectangle rooms

 

Now this was my first simple design of a school even though its not labelled i did have ideas where most classes and the courtyard would be placed but i just didn't feel that this design was very good so i moved on

This was my next design it was a little more diverse but the way i would of set it out i don't think would of made a good level it seemed to linear where you could walk from one end of the level to the other without having to turn so i moved on from this design

 

This was my nest design i felt very happy with the way this level would be set out i thought it was pretty diverse in terms of placement of rooms there was lots of corridors and corners perfect for a horror game so there was lots of places to have moving/falling items the player would see out of the corner of there eye along with this level i included a basement area and an upstairs bedroom was added this may seem strange but between the time of this and the last designs our team has decided to turn the level into a boarding school so the school would of needed space for its supplies and food like a basement/storage area and it would of also needed bedrooms.

 

This is the plan for the basement i chose to use a simple design with 3 rooms with all different purposes one to hold supplies like crates/ barrels one to hold beds and another to hold all the broken equipment like broken tables and benches.

this is the plan for the bedrooms they are also very simple one room for girl rooms opposite room is the boys room and the one at the back is the headmaster room

 



 







 

research for assets

Research for all assets

To show that i did research all of the items in my map so that they were accurate for the era i found pictures for most the items that needed them like walls, inkwells etc things like tables didn't really need research since they would really be just standard wooden tables

 

Walls

i had to research walls because in Tudors they had certain looks to there building as in every era so i found pictures as reference for my artists

These are some photos i show to my artists as reference for the walls in out Tudor level

 

 

Ink Wells

 

Ink wells also needed research so i also found pictures for my artists

 

 

These are some examples of ink wells that my artists used as reference as you can see Tudor era inkwells are generally the same shape and design with maybe more expensive ones made of glass and cheaper ones made of wood as you can see above.

 

Benches

We had to research bench designs just to be sure what they looked like in that era so not to make mistakes  

 



as you can see the benches tend to stick to the same design the only big variation other than this is a bench with a back rest but we decided to use ones like these for our level on the grounds that ones with backs may have been more expensive and that it would be easier and faster for artists to make them. Also the only difference between these type of benches are they all have different designs on there legs so artists could be creative in there making.

 

Bookcases

In our game it will be set in a school and like almost every school it would have books so we then realised we also had to make bookcases we researched types of the era bookcases

 

As you can see like many things they are all very similar giving the artists less room for there own creativity but it does give them a specific object to work with but with this there is less room for in-accuracies

 

These are the main assets that needed research for our artists  

 

 

 

Script For The Group

Script

Over the Christmas holiday I worked on the script for our level. I wrote a script that i wanted the player to feel was realistic and what a person in the players position would say. I aimed to make the dialogue touching so the player can really connect because i believe that bad/cheesy dialogue can ruin a story for a player so I kept the script as genuine as possible. I believe the script really portrays what its trying to do and that is to show a man fighting against a Un-holy evil so he can rescue his daughter that he has been desperately trying to do and this is why i hope the player will connect with the script and make the overall game play more enjoyable.

Scene: school entrance the lights are dark.

Player: Something isn't right here theres know one around

(Player walks through doors to see bodies mangled lying on the floor)
player : What happened here ? I must find Bethany
(player finds one of Bethany's books)
player: hmmm this looks like one of Bethany's books i better take it in case it gives me any clues about where she is
(Player picks up book)
player: this book it feels strange to touch
Bethany: DADDY IS THAT YOU ?
player: Bethany is that you h..how are you talking to me
Bethany: Daddy I'm lost i don't know where i am please help me
player:Daddy is going to find you Bethany just tell me where you are and i will be there
Bethany: Its dark daddy i cant see
player: just try to see Bethany try for daddy 
Bethany:.....
Player: BETHANY
Bethany: (strange voice)....It all began in the place of knowledge where all the books lie
player:Bethany what are you talking about ?
player:what did she mean the place of knowledge?
player:hmm my best chance for this is to check the library for clues for Bethany

(Enters Library)
player:ahh this must be the library i should look around
player:(after picking up a dark book) what is wrong with this book i feels its darkness every second i touch it
Bethany:Daddy is that you
player: Bethany where are you
Bethany:(strange voice) go to the place where the language is universal there will be 3 crosses there turn them upside down if you want to find me daddy
player: a language universal....she must be talking about the language of numbers i better find the mathematics room

(Enters the mathematics room)
player:this must be the mathematics room i just need to dins those crosses now
Bethany:(Strange voice) well done father 
player:what....whats wrong with you Bethany that's not you speaking
Bethany:daddy hurry i feel strange
player: i have to find her but where do i go next
Bethany:(strange voice) ahh good question father go to they place where you learn the most about your kind there you will find candles on the floor light them 
player: where i learn the most about our kind what do you mean ?
player: the only other classes around here are science i suppose i should check them for the candles

(Enters science room)
player: ahh there are the candles i should begin to light them 

(Lights candles)
Bethany :(strange voice) ah that's it i feel my power growing more mortal MORE
player: who are you YOU ARE NOT MY DAUGHTER
Bethany:I'm feeling better now daddy you must be closer hurry i love you daddy
player:daddy's coming Bethany i love you too  Bethany
Bethany: go to the basement turn all the crosses upside down like before hurry
player:i better head there now
(Enters basement)
player: this has to be the basement now just have to find those crosses
player: who's the other voice talking to me telling me to do this strange tasks never the less i Will have to continue the voice is the only thing leading me to Bethany
(turns crosses upside down)
Bethany:(strange voice) ahh well done but there is one last task you must complete before you can be given what you desire 
player: so i will get my daughter back if i do this you will let her go ?
Bethany:(strange voice) the door that leads you upstairs is unlocked now go
player: ok but you better not hurt my daughter 

(Walks upstairs)
 player: now what do i do ?
Bethany:(strange voice)there is one last task i require from you human go to the master bedroom and everything will be clear

(enters master bedroom) 
  
player: BETHANY ! can you hear me (begins crying) my little girl I'm so sorry i was too late to save me just please come back to me
player: WHY... why would you kill her 
strange voice: look at her mortal this girl has been here for months she has been dead just as long as the other corpses in the place..... i should know i killed them all
player: but.... she was talking to me 
strange voice:(laughs) i thought it was convincing too
Bethany:(strange voice) help me daddy help me (laughs) i love you daddy (laughs)
player: you're a monster
strange voice: no mortal i am much worse than that but like i said there is one last task i require... a sacrifice 

(Lights blowout)
player:what...what are you doing 
strange voice: what i said i need a sacrifice
player: what...no.. get off me AGHHH
player:(screams)

(silence)

Demon:... welcome to Hell (laughs)