Game Design Principles

principles of modern game design, including areas such as character and environment design for games; associated tools, pipeline(s) and techniques; understanding of game and gameplay tropes; creation of basic game types using coding and the technical differences in creating assets for games compared with other types of media

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The animations for my main character to show how she would have used the bow and other positions such as walking, running and idle. The mesh around the back of the knees has had issues because the limbs are made up of two or more shapes. So where these shapes overlap sometimes become deformed.

I continued with the character in this way given that if I had enough time at the end of the project I aimed to fix it. But the main function of the character worked so it wasn’t an urgent demand as much as fixing the blueprint and importing the animations - although that part never worked.

In the future I would make the character and test importing immediately instead of expecting the rig to work after retargeting or the weight painting to accommodate for overlapping mesh.

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The animations for my anxiety gremlin that also didn’t make it into the game because the mesh would become corrupted or “spiky” a common problem I found while researching. The only way I managed to solve this was by generating a quick/auto rig in maya thereby sacrificing all the animations.

The animations are basic movements but they show more of a personality to the character being a negative emotion.

My materials haven’t been updated on this demonstration and that is why the gremlin is all black.

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The audio demo for Paradigm which plays through the recorded narrative that would have played through the game & heart level.

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Some images from the lectures and my research into Rules of Play.

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Unreal Cinematics and Assets

The full scene using a plane that has my image applied as a texture.

This full background was made in Photoshop and applied to the plane in Maya. It shows the sky on earth and the transition into space.

From inside the star

light fog, sadly my efforts went to waste because Maya Software Renderer doesn’t show it.

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Making the pose animation for the bow inside Unreal

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Weapon and Third Person Projectile BP

Parenting the bow and adding the socket. This was done by adding a static mesh component in the Third Person BP and attaching it to the parent socket. But this meant that when I played the game the character was already paired with the bow.

Here is the blueprint from my PickUp Actor to begin overlap and toggle visibility of the pickup widget.

Adding the bow pose animation inside Unreal

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Using IKs

With rigging in Maya, I discovered that whilst it works to animate it doesn’t work when imported and retargeted in Unreal. So my characters used the standard animation blueprints from the Third Person Example despite having prepared animations for Paradigm. Testing this sooner would have helped me determine a solution and I would have fixed my rigging methods to be able to use the original animations in Unreal. Instead of using my animations I used a quick rig in Maya and surrendered my time to the blueprints since majority of the time was spent generating the right archery and gremlin animation movements.

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Main Menu HUD

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Environment

Making tubes through the heart using a merge in Zbrush.

I made a dome for the walls that gave the impression of a lungs type flesh environment but for a reason I’m assuming is the fact that it was closed at the top, the player could not start the level inside. When the level started the player would fall around the dome and not inside where the orbs and gremlins are. Because of this, I used the original walls I made with a geometry box inside Unreal and applied the lung tissue texture to it as well as the floor.

The texture covered the floor well but the walls seemed to repeat the pattern multiple times and it no longer seemed to convey any realism on the level that the heart did.

Below is the texture.

The pink texture has a pasty and almost chalk like appearance which seems both soft and hard. This worked for my environment since something that is naturally soft (lungs, diaphragm and organ tissue) are now posing as walls and floor which are naturally hard. So this texture conveys both and makes it believable that it’s soft tissue that is hard enough to run on.

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UI

For the intro, the player can choose to rewatch the montage or start the game. This is the button to play the video again. I’m making it in Photoshop.

The play button

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My idle animation asset when used with my model in Unreal shows nice detail to the fingers and the expression and shoulders aren’t deformed. The Third Person Idle hunched my character over and warped the mesh.

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After applying the Anim BP from the Third Person to my character it sets the transform values to either too low or too high.

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Textures

I used a Blinn texture instead of Arnold because it turned to pastel when my character with arnold textures was imported into Unreal.

Even when using phong the materials didn’t import so I imported pngs into Unreal and made them material instances and applied them to the character. Here I have only applied a skin texture so the rest is black.

The rig of the character seems to clash with the mesh and the third person idle, stance and animation poses. Even the lips of my character are deformed despite not having bones. So in order to give my players a sense of option with characters I’m going to have a character selection page.

This should also solve my mesh/rig problem and I’ll resign this character since it’s given me so much trouble within Unreal and stolen time which could’ve been spent on the Blueprints.

This character (above) is the auto rigged version. My personal rig always ended with spiky mesh points. My animations for the character were only recorded for the rig I created. So as a last attempt I reimported the version that gives me the spiky mesh.

For some reason this was rotated diagonally as shown. I’ll attempt to fix the model and animations hoping I can still use it.

Above shows I used basic textures in Unreal (just to test, textures were actually different shades of gravel or stone/concrete). I then imported an idle animation and set the animation to asset instead of the generic Third Person BP. This made my mesh more stable and not become spiky.

The eyebrows are being swallowed by the rest of the body as it moves the eyebrows wave in and out. So I may use a handful of characters instead just to make it simple.

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After struggling since my model would end up ‘spiky’ when retargeted in unreal, I used an auto rig in maya instead of doing it manually. This made it work much smoother and allowed me to test the character to work out other kinks and progress my work.