Jag FMP Y2 O.C.

Official blog for development of the game Chernobyl: First Responders

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CFR: The Gameplay Video

Here's my final gameplay video for my FMP! Chernobyl: First Responders. Overall, I'm personally really overjoyed with how my final product has turned out. It's got almost all of the features I proposed and has presented them well, bar a few such as the ending though I don't concern myself with this too much and can continue in the future if I wish.

The video itself is around 6 minutes long, and has been cut in certain parts such as long driving scenes & tedious scenes like putting out the fire.

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Development: CFR's Itch.io Page

I thought that to present my final product well, I'd create an itch page for others to access if need be. I created a thumbnail in photoshop similar to the main menu of the game, and added a short tagline description alongside it!

I'm incredibly happy with how this has turned out, and I feel it's been presented in a professional manner. I'll add a link below for anybody that reads this post to play.

Chernobyl: First Responders by Jaguar0137

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Update: Packaging the game

I thought I'd add a short post to update that the game has officially been cooked, and packaged ready to be sent off for marking. I needed to make sure to select the shipping option to exclude all print strings and linetraces, and have made sure the final product is all setup for the gameplay video I'll be recording next.

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Feedback: Running my final playtest

I thought I'd do one more overall playtest for the finished game, to get some opinions on it. I won't be able to work on this feedback due to the submission date, but I'd like to atleast get some useful feedback to see if people like the game overall.

From below, it's seemed to have been quite popular amongst my peers, one of which asking for more of the story. From this, I may continue development outside of college, though I'm not fully sure.

Overall with some quirks, I'm very happy with the feedback I recieved.

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Development: Menu screen for CFR

Being on the very last day of the week for development, near the deadline, I've opted to create a more simplistic menu system which looks like such, with options to access the controls, credits & story alongside an exit game button.

Below is what the credits & control screens look like:

On the topic of the logic within these buttons, each plays a transitional widget, and then adds the correct widget to the viewport, quits the game, or opens the starting level.

I'm quite happy with how this has turned out, and I feel it gives the character all the correct information they need to know.

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Development: Dialogue within CFR's story

Before I begin, I'll be referencing most of the major lines in the game below:

I was able to write these up in one evening, and then hand it off to 2 select voice actors I chose that I thought would fit the game. With this, I hoped to bring some life to the characters, allowing the player to have an insight into said character development and invoke more of an emotional reaction when Aleks is killed off.

Referring back to my story progression system post - implementing my dialogue was as simple as brushing through all of my story code and inserting either 2D Playsounds for Sergei or Playsound at location with attenuation for other characters in the correct locations.

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Development: Transitional Widgets

This will be a short post, but more of a polishing/quality of life improvement for CFR, and this lies in creating two widgets with animations to play when transitioning between levels.

One is called FadeIn, and one is FadeOut, these are played accordingly and the animations last 2 secconds. I personally feel it just smoothens out the overall experience, the animation itself consists of a black image with it's opacity being keyed to fade.

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Development: Tackling the story aspects in CFR

Below in this post I'll be showing how I tackled the story aspects for each of the 5 scenes within CFR. My main technique was using the Level Blueprint in each level to progress with casting to variables within actors to break loops as shown in an example below within the Chernobyl scene.

A very important section I implemented I'd like to cover here was Aleksandr's deathscene. I tackled this with a moving falling concrete pillar I animated in blender and imported to time with a mixamo animation playing to knock aleks down.

For the dialogue, I'll be covering it in the next post as I feel it deserves it's own.

I followed the flow chart I created multiple posts ago for the overall progression of the story, and only left out the ending opting to replace it with this end card due to limited time constraints.

I'll hold off from showing all the rest of the code, as it all consists of the state machine type logic I showed you at the start to progress and play cutscenes/dialogue.

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Development: Using the sequencer to implement cutscenes

Something I've always wanted to try and tackle are cutscenes, and I have recently learnt they are incredibly easy to implement, to begin here I placed a cinematic camera within the scene, and created a new sequence with this button at the top of the screen

Within the sequence itself, I drag in the camera actor to prepare for keyframing very similar to animation, and pilot the camera within the viewport so I control where it ends up.

The keying for the final intro sequence looks like so, and moves the camera between a moving truck in the intro, the power plant, and the main character Sergei.

I encountered an issue which I diagnosed and was able to fix from tinkering around in where the cutscene would cut off too short when playing. This was as simple as moving the length of the sequence to fit the length of the animation and I feel overall this was a very successful cutscene I had implemented, this can be seen in the final gameplay video coming up.

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Development: Road between Pripyat & Chernobyl level

Very simple development on this front, all I'm looking to put in this level is a road surrounded by trees and Khrushchyovkas at one end, Chernobyl power plant at the other. Due to the development process being INCREDIBLY short, around 5-6 minutes short, I will be showing the outcome as I used all the same methods and assets as the Pripyat level.

I'm rather happy with this, it serves as a nice long driving segment to be able to ferry out some dialogue in whilst driving. That's the plan anyways, hoping I have enough time by this point.

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Development: Adding the firetruck & ambulance

For my game, I decided on the two best candidates for the firetruck and ambulance of the 1986 period being the RAF-22034 and Zil 131 AC 40 pictured below

Once again, I looked to source models for these due to being on a day or two left of time to develop the entire game now.

I was able to source both models from sketchfab, and as is the standard by now they will go into my credits in the start screen of CFR.

For the code, theres not much to add as I simply duplicated the current vehicle system for both and replaced the meshes with the ones I sourced. For the siren code, I was able to find two sirens on youtube which were period and model appropriate for the vehicles, and imported these into engine to loop and use to play off of the R key.

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Development: Making my NPC system

Going into this, I was rather afraid that I wasn't going to be able to create a great NPC system as I'm not experienced with modelling humans. To get around this, I decided to have a look online to try and find PS1 styled character bases - to my surprise I was infact able to find one for free, the credits for this are listed in the final game product!

I firstly started off by modifying the textures image file to give the character two types of Soviet fireman clothes, one would be used for Aleksandr and the other for generic firemen.

My next thoughts on this whole system were on animation and rigging, and I have already discovered that this infact takes up a lot of time. And so I decided to give a new website I discovered a try called Mixamo. With this, I was able to use it's algorithm to automatically rig the model I sourced and use prebuilt animations. For this I picked out a jogging animation and idle.

I then imported this into the game, and placed it within the scene to make sure it worked. It did in fact work, and here's a development screenshot from when I imported it textureless.

My next and final point of call was to setup a NavMesh, in which I was simply able to drag out and place into the scene and an animation blueprint/blendspace for the character. I referred to online videos to find out how to use both of these features and was able to come up with a system which feels cohesive.

Essentially, my blendspace blends between two linear points one end set to the characters movement speed and the other to 0 having idle animation at one end and jogging at the other

With this, inside the AnimBP I am able to drag in the blendspace and utilise this speed chart to plug into my output pose.

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Development: Adding smoke/fire system

Fire

The main thing I'd like to tackle now that I've got the actual Chernobyl model in the game is the fire - as my hose system still currently is only decorative and has no fire to put out. The way I've been wanting to tackle this is keeping true to the aesthetic with animated 2D textures similar to the foliage within CFR. I plan to use PaperFlipbooks to achieve this.

I once again photobashed the textures for each of these fire sprites, but when put together they resemble a crackling fire animation.

As for the system in where this can be extinguished, I decided to adopt a method suggested to me by one of my peers.

I created a master "FireManager" blueprint actor which contained a variable called "Increase", this would be used by the fire actor itself to discern when all the actors have been extinguished. I placed 12 fire actors in the Chernobyl level itself and so I implemented code within firemanager so that when firemanager increments to 11 (0 is included as a number) it will trigger the next sequence in the story i'll be programming soon.

The custom event for this is called within the fire actor each time the health has depleted enough. Logic within the fire actor consists of on event hit, it increments a health variable by one. Once health is at 60 it gets the firemanager actor and increases the aforementioned variable by one. It also makes sure that the object hitting the fire is the projectile I used for my hose & decreases the overall scale, the code is seen below

Finally, The smoke was as simple as creating a Niagara fountain system with reverse gravity using the texture shown below

Ingame, the result looks like this:

I'm quite happy with this, and I feel it fits the style well.

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Environment Design: Chernobyl Power Plant's level design

In this post, I'll be finishing off the rest of the background level design for my Chernobyl level in CFR. I'll add a small bullet point list below of assets I'd like to implement.

Existing within game files

Khrushchyovkas posing as misc buildings

Trees

Roads & landscape

New

Newer Khrush type buildings

Background power plant funnel clutter

Building connected to main plant

Implementation

Firstly, I thought it'd be sensible to set some sort of rough edge boundaries by placing existing tree groups from the Pripyat level around. The layout can be seen from above, note that this post is being made after finishing the map and so other aspects coming up are visible.

As is now standard in most of my levels, I sculpted the landscape upwards at the tree border to create the illusion of a forest and hide the lack of trees and/or anything behind.

As for the power plant clutter & new background buildings, I used these two sprites below that I "photobashed" into textures for my game, similar to the likes of techniques used in DOOM. Alongside this, my Khruschyovka sprites can be seen re-used.

Lastly, for the surrounding higher detail buildings I referenced images of Chernobyl Power Plant, and ended up modelling these in engine using the same textures as the power plant itself.

Overall, I feel this comes together to make a very convincing level. I showed it to 3 subjects that had not seen the game before and each stated that the area looked like Chernobyl Power Plant as their first choice.

Conclusion

From this post, I've shown my processes in putting together my created assets to make a convincing Chernobyl level. I'm very happy with my result in this, and it's clear from feedback that I've done well.

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Art Design: Modelling & Implementing Pylons for Chernobyl

With any power station, Electric pylons are a staple feature for transporting electricity away from the plant. These also work great as filler objects to bulk out the map in a short amount of time. Looking at photos of Chernobyl Power Plant, I can infer these larger Pylons were used in a linear fashion behind the main building. I'm not making the exact same model of Pylon here due to a time crunch, but references are shown below

Images: Chernobyl Power Plant & Pylon

Below is the final model I was able to come up with for my game. During my modelling process, I used techniques such as the mirror modifier which allows me to replicated my model on a chosen axis and loop cuts to subdivide my model in a specific location vertically or horizontally. I opted to use the mirror modifier to add a slight curvature

Implementation

Bringing the model into the game, I opted to use two existing triplanar materials. The lamppost metal for the frame, and "ConcreteRoof" from the khrushchyovka for the insulated prongs.

Once I placed two of these meshes in the level, I connected them via cable components left as the default dark material with a slight bit of slack to mimic powerlines.

I personally think overall this has added a lot to the level, and I'm very happy with my outcome on this model!

Conclusion

From my post, I've been able to showcase my model, and explain my short implementation process for my Pylon.

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Art Design: Modelling Chernobyl Power Plant

To start off development with the Chernobyl level, I've made a low-poly model of the rough shape of the power plant's main building. Placing this in the level will allow me to gauge whereabouts I'd like the firemen to stand tackling the blaze, and this level shouldn't require much time due to not having to move around a fully fledged area.

Image: Chernobyl Power Plant 1986

Below is the untextured model I've come up with as regards to reference images used:

To create this model, I utilised methods including Loop cuts to extrude certain parts of a cube object, negating the need to create more separate cubes bring the overall performance of the model poorer (Not that it would matter so much with a PSX styled model), and will be using the Boolean modifier to cut a hole where the blasted out part of the plant is creating a hole effect.

If I get time, I'd love a cutscene in where the plant itself blows up. Because of this I'll be saving this complete model seperate, and progressing with the destructed state of my desired final product.

Below, I am showing both the final texture assignment materials of both the Intact and destroyed variants, featuring a large simple hole I will build on in UE5, I used the Boolean modifier to achieve this.

Implementation

I've brought the destroyed model ingame and have applied textures with my MTP material to keep it even. I found concrete tiles, which is what I can infer Chernobyl was made from via images, and a rubble texture. The rest was pre-existing textures. For the chimney, I made my own split texture which i'll show below that tiles in the correct striped manner.

The low poly rubble was created by subdividing a plane in blender, and creating a bumped/randomness effect on the surface to simulate piles of material, I think personally it turned out great.

Conclusion

I've created a model in a short timeframe which resembles Chernobyl Power Plant, having both a destructed and intact version for CFR, I feel this will import well and I'm happy with my result! I have also discovered in turn how to create a rubble pile/piles of most materials in my PSX style.

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Error Diagnostics: Fixing my Triplanar material

I thought I'd quickly chip in with an issue I faced quite a while ago, but wasn't sure exactly how to tackle and this lies with fixing my Triplanar Projection material.

The issue I faced was mainly relating to the orientation of the texture, it would stretch massively on the vertical axis rendering it fully unusable for the sides of buildings. Due to having a Chernobyl Power Plant model in production, I thought this'd be very important to fix to save time.

Very simple fix, It turns out it just consisted of adding a texture parameter object to the TEX input of the texture sample, and it's fixed my issue as can be seen in the first image with the windows!

My solution came from experimentation, this was the first stage of it. My next step in the process if this didn't work was going to be attempting to reroute the connections coming out of the "BreakOutFloat3Components" node.