Seren's Symphony

My second project: A first person music based platformer!

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One way too big post for all the stuff I forgot to post

Would like to start things off by saying the only reason I haven't posted much of the development for my game is because I was off a lot and had to essentially speed run it to get to an actual playable game. So many original ideas had to be scrapped because of this.

Story/Plot: For this one, I'll give you a before and an after of what it was and now is.

Before: Before I had to scrap the idea and speed run my project, the game would have been a music based first person platformer. It would have been a set of trials with different sound cues telling you what you had to do. For example, a drum noise would mean jump. There was supposed to be progressively more difficult levels, some with sequences you had to remember.

After: A trial where you have to essentially do a Roman entertainment fight only this time you have a pan flute gun and the enemies have bongo hats and are cubes.

Objective: I don't think my game really has an objective. The original objective was to escape the king (Mr Tambourine) and get home. Unfortunately, this couldn't be achieved. I guess wipe out all the enemies as fast as possible?

Genre: Now my game is a first person shooter but before it was supposed to be a first person platformer.

Other games that inspired me: There wasn't really any other games that inspired me. I came up with the idea when I was told about the project. Other games I looked at just didn't really contain what I wanted. The colosseum was sorta inspired by the movie Gladiator but also just a regular Roman one.

Art style: The art style I used is voxels using Magica Voxel. This is because I find it easier to design things using pixels. Nothing has to be too detailed, it can be just a block with a face and an instrument hat like I did for both the king and the enemies.

My actual project:

This part is for all the things I did in my project.

The Gun:

This is the gun I use in my game. It's a basic 15 pipe pan flute that makes pan flute noises when you fire it.

It fires a custom projectile that looks like this:

In the projectile code, there is the hitting enemies code.

What this does is it checks if the thing the projectile is hitting has a specific tag called "Enemy". If it does it will see how much health the enemy has and take 50 away from it, destroying the actor if its health is equal to or below 0.

The assets of the game itself:

Now we move on to the actual assets I created for the game.

The colosseum:

A basic circle shape in the middle with a much larger circle around it. I used an incredibly helpful website in order to create the circles.

Pixel Circle / Oval Generator (Minecraft)

Pixel Circle and Oval Generator for help building shapes in games such as Minecraft or Terraria

It's meant for Minecraft but you can input any numbers you like and it will give you a pixel grid of it. I then built a "throne" for the king. It's more of just a platform with a red carpet on it.

The king himself/Mr Tambourine:

The king's face was totally random. I drew random circle-ish shapes and coloured them in. The Tambourine on top of his head was made with the circle generator that I used for the colosseum, I then added the little symbol things.

The Enemies:

The enemies are all the same, the king but recoloured and with bongos instead of a tambourine. Mostly self explanatory.

Sound:

I have no idea what to say for some of this. I can say that what it does is it will see if you pressed the left mouse button and if you did it will then check if you have the rifle. If you have the rifle it will then play a random pan flute sound and fires the projectile. I don't know what the location and the rotation bit does.

Now we get to the part that I can't put down as I couldn't get any screenshots of it. I couldn't change the gun to begin with, it ended up being the same mesh but the wrong way up, not my pan flute. Eventually it was fixed and works now. That's about all there was for my game. None of the code was really changed.

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Games that look like they use Voxels/ actually do

Crossy Road - Crossy Road very obviously uses Voxels. It's quite a simply made game with no ending. It's an endless run and I believe it randomizes every time? I'm not sure.

Minecraft - I don't believe Minecraft uses voxels from my look at the assets for the game (I tried to make a resource pack, I gave up.) It looks like it does but every block is one singular face, wrapped around an imaginary square. The mobs are made with nets of shapes and have pixels coloured on them, but the blocks are all the same.

Teardown - Not only is this game made entirely out of Voxels but each Voxel is individually animated and it somehow manages to run completely smoothly. Teardown is a game where your main goal seems to be destruction. This is done by using Ray Tracing which is typically used for simulating reflections or other visual effects. You can destroy everything and even create interesting ways to do so, such as ramming vehicles through walls.

Skies Of The Past - Couldn't find a video for this one. This game is a calming Voxel adventure game where all features such as the music and movement work and flow together to make the game feel relaxing.

Fugl - In this game you play as a shapeshifting rainbow bird. The environment and other animals are entirely made with Voxels and it looks beautiful. One of the main features about Fugl is how the bird transforms based on what animals you find which keeps the game feeling alive and dynamic.

The Touryst - Another Voxel game. This one seems to have a level concept I think. It has specific environments per level.

Bonfire Peaks - This game seems to be a puzzle game with a specific number of moves you can make in a level which limits what the player is able to do and makes them think about how they play. This one has really nice torch and fire animations.

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MAYA - What is it?

This video gives a basic tutorial of some of the aspects of Maya.

Autodesk Maya is a 3D modeling and animation software which is used in many games. It is mostly easy to get the hang of but I feel like my game is going to primarily be pixels so I will be using MagicaVoxel instead. I don't understand most of the parts to Maya. Also, making textures is done automatically in MagicaVoxel by colouring voxels, as opposed to creating UV maps for Maya in Photoshop which is far harder.

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Changing the distance you can hear the sound

All you have to do to change this is go to the content drawer and create an Attenuation. Then go in to the Attenuation and change the inner and outer radius values to bigger or smaller depending on what you want to do.

This affects how loud a sound is, andthe further from the source you are, the quieter it gets as it fades out. This could be used to create direction in a maze as the player gets 'hotter' or 'colder' from the objective, guided by sound.

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Adding a sound at specific location

This is the code to add a sound at the location of the actor. It's mostly straightforward, just right clicking and searching for "play sound at location" and then selecting the sound that you imported. Then you need to get the location so you right click again and search for "get actor location" and then pop the "return value" pin into the location pin on the "play sound" node.

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Sounds in Unreal

Playing a sound in Unreal using the "play sound 2D" node. This now plays a boing sound effect when I use the launch pad. MP3 is not supported in Unreal so if your sound is that format you'll have to convert it to a .wav file first.

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Comparison: Magica Voxel and Maya

This is the same object made in the different softwares.

The top one is Magica Voxel. As you can see it is actually more detailed that the one in Maya. This is because I find Magica Voxel so much easier to use and less time consuming. In Maya, you have to export a UV map as a png and then draw in it to then import it back into Maya to create a textured asset. In Magica Voxel you don't have to go through exporting it to edit the texture, you just have to export it in order to put it into Unreal. I absolutely love this software and I will probably use it for my game going forwards. Maya is just super difficult for me, there's too much stuff you can do. I prefer it to be simple.

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Made the first thing that's probably going to go into my game!

I made this pan flute as a potential weapon for my character.

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Imported boom box

I exported my boombox from MagicaVoxel into unreal engine. Originally, it was very very small and tilted on its side. The reason it appears on its side is because Unreal Engine does the X Y and Z angle things wrong, Voxel however does them correctly. To fix this, I rotated it by 90 degrees and scaled it up a lot. I will have to do this with all my assets and scale them up by the same amount if I want their voxels to be the same size.

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Voxel Medkit and Boombox

Used the same tools from before to make the boombox I made in Maya and the Medkit I made in Maya.

I created both objects by making a large grey rectangle before adding the handles. I tweaked these until I was happy with them [I kept doing this trying to get the scale right] and added the boombox's speakers after colouring the rectangle. I switched between multiple designs for the medkit, such as making the cross indented or adding a line around the centre where the two halves come together but I decided against it because I preferred how it looked before. I then added 'DMC' on the back of the boombox as I didn't have the space to draw the characters.

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Voxel Chair

I was introduced to a new software today called Magica Voxel. It is essentially a tool for 3D pixel art.

This is a chair I made using the attach tool (creating new pixels). To make this, I started with the seat and built out from there. I switched between multiple colours but settled on this as it's one of my favourite colour combinations. This program is incredibly easy to use and I love it. I might use it to create the basic characters for my game (using concept art of course).

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Making a boom box using UV mapping in Maya

Today I made a boombox using Maya (I'm not going to add one into my game, this was just to get a general feel for UV mapping.) First, you need to make the basic boom box shape and the handle. Once you've done that, you need to go to the top right of Maya and find the drop down menu where it says general. Change that to UV Editing and it will come up with

this menu. Then you need to click the little camera icon above it and change it to a png and change the colour of the lines so you can see them in photoshop. Then you need to open photoshop, select open and then open your image. Then you need to create a design.

This is mine (the stuff outside the boxes doesn't matter, Maya will only look for the things inside the boxes). Then you need to import that in to Maya. To do that, you need to export your photoshop file as a jpeg. Then, you need to go into Maya and assign your boombox a material. You need to select either Blinn or Lambert. Then you need to edit this. Where it says colour in the side menu for your material, select the checkboard icon next to it. In the menu that comes up, select file. Then that menu will close, but there should be a small folder icon on the side which you can select your image from. Once the image is selected, it should look like this when you open the UV map again:

And then it's done. You have yourself a wonderful boombox.

And yes, I did put Nero, Vergil, Dante and V on my boombox. It's not going to be used so it doesn't really matter.

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A maze

Made a maze in unreal using the modeling software. First, I created the base and then raised the maze walls out from there after making sure my character could fit

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Making things grow and die

This essentially is doing a check. First it checks if the thing the projectile is hitting has the tag "kill" attached to it. If it does, it'll make it disappear and then destroy the projectile. If the object being hit does not have the tag "kill" it will look for one called "grow" instead. If it has the tag "grow", it will make the object bigger by the amount in the dimensions you set. It will then destroy the projectile. If the object has none of these it will just destroy the projectile.

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Rapid Fire Code

Allowed for rapid fire with a gun

Right click in the event graph of the gun and search "Left Click", select this one:

Then right click somewhere else and search "gate". Select this one:

Then drag off of the "Pressed" function in the left mouse button node and connect it to the "open" function on the gate, do the same thing with the "Released" function but put it into the "close" function. After you've done this, right click somewhere else again and search "event tick" and select this one:

Then do a separate right click again and search for "delay". Select this one:

Then drag off from the "event tick" node and connect it to the "delay" node. Connect the "delay" node to the "enter" part of the gate node. Lastly, connect the exit part of the gate to the "spawn actor bp first person projectile" right about the "class" part on that node.

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Weird Weapons Research

Mr Toots - Red Faction Armageddon. Mr Toots is an incredibly weird weapon. https://youtu.be/TCvYlqMCtKg?feature=shared That video is all there is to explain it to be perfectly honest (I'm so sorry if it doesn't work, the video is age restricted on youtube). It is quite literally a really overpowered weapon that is a unicorn. THE WEAPON WORKS BY MAKING SAID UNICORN FART. I cannot believe what I have just had to witness.

The Dubstep Gun - Saints Row IV. A gun that shoots dubstep music? I suppose it's not as bad as Mr Toots but it is still incredibly weird. It seems to make people dance upon shooting them? I have no idea. Here's a video. https://youtu.be/3UkTYiYcpho?feature=shared

Groovitron - Ratchet and Clank. A weapon that allows you to make your enemies dance. This it definitely one of the best weapons I have ever seen and it's in one of my favourite games. https://youtu.be/e4LI6ll8OMI?feature=shared

Mutated Milk - Team Fortress 2. The mutated milk seems to actually help the player. When thrown on to enemies, 60% of the damage you do to them while they have the effect will be given back to you and it will heal you. This one seems to have a more tactical advantage in my opinion. https://youtu.be/E0gOQvRox1c?feature=shared

The Cluckshot - Gears Of War 3. Less of a weapon more of a supply drop. The Cluckshot is a strange box that sprouts a chicken and drops weapons similar to how a chicken lays eggs? I'll be honest I don't really know what to say about this one. https://youtu.be/hAVS0wVDoLQ?feature=shared

The Hand Cannon - Dead Space 2. This is no ordinary supporting glove, it actually shoots. You can only get it in one way and it is a tiresome effort to do so but I assume it's a good reward for doing that. https://youtu.be/xhU6zDzQPVI?feature=shared

Super Sheep - Worms. I have no idea how this one works as I can't find a video but I assume it works like a bullet and deals damage after flying through the air? Here is an image.

Some of the youtube links may not have worked so just in case I will place them here.

Mr Toots:

No idea if this one will work but here you go.

Groovitron:

Mutated Milk:

The Cluckshot:

The Hand Cannon:

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A teleporter

This is my teleporter (the very obvious white part is hidden in game, I needed it for collisions). In order to code the teleporter and have it teleport to a specific location, you need to have a target point. This can be found in the little object adding part by searching for it. You then need to create a variable and make it public (this allows you to change the values from the main screen rather than only in the variable options). After that, you need to find the location of your target point that you placed. This can be found by selecting your target point and looking at this bit here.

To make it so you do not have to write out the exact values, right click here:

and select copy, then go to your teleporter variable and paste it by right clicking the same place shown in the above image and selecting paste. Once you have done this, you can go over the code (probably should do it before). Here is the code:

This should allow you to have a working teleporter in your game.