Project 4

Project 4 brief

We have been giving a new six week long project the objective is to work in groups like the last and to make another level but the difference is that we now have to make the level in a new engine called construct 2. This basically means the designer will have to learn a new engine.  

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