We completed our golden spike, finalized our game mechanics and theme and in between all of these, on Wednesday, we had our 1/4s presentations. Our final world is an ‘Ancient Lost Civilization’.
We got very valuable feedback from the faculty during our 1/4s. While they appreciated the details and thought behind each theme, they cautioned us against the pitfalls that teams usually fall into when making a vertical slice for a AAA game. Essentially, we found that we needed to speed up our process of deciding on the game design, narrative design and all the other aspects to quickly start making the level. We also received some feedback on how to make team decisions for such a project where multiple people have a say in the design part of the final product and received some really actionable feedback from the faculty which will be detailed further in this update. Apart from this, we also got good feedback from our SME on our golden spike project.
What we did this week?
Programming:
- Animation: As we don’t have a character artist in our team, we tried animation retargeting for our character animations in the gold spike. It is a feature that allows animations to be shared between characters that use different skeletons as long as they share a similar Bone Hierarchy. We migrate some animations from the UE4 skeleton and Maximo skeleton to our UE5 skeleton, and they work quite well with it.
- Gameplay: We added the VFX given by our artist to the map and to the interactable objects.
- Design: We pitched a list of the basic character moving skills and combat skills we want to make in the future.
- We finished stealth and enemy AI’s patrol. Multiple patrol locations can now be added. Here is how to set the patrol locations: for each enemy, click into details, add as many patrol locations as you like. Give each location a vector. A good way to set vectors is to move something to the patrol location and copy its location vector into the vector array.
- We made a quick demo of stealth and the patrolling feature in the Cyberpunk map.
Level Design:
- We worked on solving gameplay issues with the blockout before our quarters presentation.
- After receiving feedback for our quarter’s, we started working on making two versions of a basic beat-by-beat gameplay flow for the level.
- We started working on making presentations for each version that we could present to the team by next week with a basic narrative for the level and image references for the puzzles and areas inside the level.
Art and VFX:
- We work on finalizing our theme and environment and started making an art bible.
- A little bit of worldbuilding.
- Gathering art references and detailing our art language for the props and structures that will be included in our final level.
Production:
- We started a new weekly sprint schedule listed below:
- Mon: Instructor meeting, recap meeting, weekly task adjustment
- Tue: Work time, make build, playtest
- Wed: Stand-up, weekly task allotment, SME meeting, recap meeting
- Thurs: Work time
- Friday: Mini-standup, recap meeting, progress report documentation
- We divided the decision making process amongst the departments in our team to hasten the process and start working on the main level in the engine by the end of the next week.
Some challenges we faced and their solutions
Programming:
Problems –
- Gameplay: Some VFX didn’t work well in the interactable object (Actor Blueprint) as it is static and cannot be moved elsewhere. And some VFX just cost too much which leads to program crashes.
- Design: It was difficult to start on pitching the character skill list, and we got stuck from time to time.
Solutions to the problems –
- Gameplay: We asked our SME for help about the optimization of the VFX, lighting and other stuff. He gave us some suggestions on how to optimize based on our need for the map.
- Design: We tried to find as many references as we could, and also as programmers, we talked more about our ideas with the art and design department. They gave us some very valuable suggestions and ideas on designing the character skills.
Things we learnt –
- Gameplay: Got more familiar with Unreal Engine and knowing how to use Blueprint to achieve our goals. Also we got to know how to make Actor Blueprint and Animation Blueprint work together.
Level Design:
Problems –
- It was difficult for us to figure out the narrative for the level from a blue sky description.
Solutions to the problems –
- We solved this by starting with the mechanics that the gameplay department had decided to include in the final level and made sure that each of those mechanics is used in our level and is meaningful to what the player is doing with those mechanics. Next, we used the art bible provided by our artists to think of the areas and what kind of spaces, puzzles and enemy interactions would fit in with our theme. This led us to make a narrative for both the level pitches according to the rest of the game that fits everything well.
Things we learnt –
- It is really difficult to start from a blue sky and sometimes it helps to take the rest of the elements of the game that have been decided and work your way in reverse to the narrative.
Art:
Problems –
- We had a few ideas of the theming that we were interested in. We could not reach a consensus to decide which one we should settle down
- The concept of “the Lost Atlantis” was among the proposed themes but was too ambiguous and lacked clear direction.
Solutions to the problems –
- We gathered other departments to discuss. For example, we discussed with the programmers to see which theme fits their mechanism better.
- We decided to move away from the term “Atlantis” to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Instead, we focused on defining a clear shape language for our environment and establishing a more detailed theme for our worldbuilding.
Production:
Problems –
- We found that it had been really difficult to make decisions related to the game mechanics, theme, art and narrative as we were a 7 person team and the possibility of everyone being on the same page and interested and passionate about the same things would be extremely rare. We could not let this carry on as we need to start working on the level as soon as possible.
Solutions to the problems –
- To solve this, we decided to give responsibility for specific parts of the game to respective departments. For example, the programming team was responsible for the game design and mechanics while the art team was in charge of the theme and the VFX related decision. The level design team was made in charge of the pacing, beats, flow and narrative of the game.
- The process was such that every department would discuss amongst themselves and come up with the concepts and ideas they would like to work on and then pitch and explain them to the team and if the team did not have any issues with it, that would be finalized. This helped us in deciding the game mechanics, the art style, the theme and the rough narrative by the end of the week.
Things we learnt –
- It is better to delegate decisions in smaller groups when working with teams in a project semester especially when dealing with a blue sky description.
Things to do for next week:
- Level designers need to pitch the levels to the whole team and get everyone’s inputs and possibly finalize the level.
- Get feedback on the “Defining polished” and the mechanics, enemy behavior, art bible and the level pitch documents from the SME and the instructors.
- Start making prototypes for the game mechanics which are finalized and are supposed to be included in the final level.
- Work on making a narrative for the whole game.
