Robs Games Design

My name is Robert Field, I am a game designer and lover. This is my professional blog it will feature content that I post, share and have been working on. Feel free to message or ask me stuff and my portfolio is here: www.robsgamesdesign.com enjoy and thanks for visiting.

[robsgamesdesign]

I've completed Mars Marine!

I have to admit, with lockdown easing and things getting busier, I believe that I managed to get this course completed at a good time! I realise this post is a little bit overdue especially if anyone had seen my LinkedIn post and was eagerly waiting for the blog post. I have been a fair bit busier lately like everyone else and I just have not gotten round to it, my apologies.

Without further ado, I’ve completed the third and final module of the UE4 Blueprints course that I was enjoying; Mars Marine! The download will be available soon on the modules page here, so keep an eye out if you have been looking forward since the last sneak peek.

This, of course, means that the course is completed and I have a certificate to prove that:

Unfortunately the quoted date is incorrect as I believe the course videos continued playing when I minimised it on the 26th June, I completed this on the 16th July 2020!

Update: I prepared this a while back but did not schedule it for release. You’d be correct in thinking there’s a bit of a gap from the release of this post and the completion, I have no ‘excuse’ but I have been extraordinarily busy recently and not been able to get back to the blog till now.

[robsgamesdesign]

Marine Movement

Progress in the third and (unfortunately) final module for the Blueprints Course is going really well! I wanted to give a quick sneak peak of what I have so far, so without further adue, please enjoy this snippet:

As you can see the Mars Marine game is a top down wave shooter and its been a lot of fun putting my spin on the module!

[robsgamesdesign]

Crystal Cavern is completed!

Another module is complete, this time Crystal Cavern, it’s been a lot of fun, so much that I have been spending as much spare time I can in engine!

In this module I’ve built a game in which players have to traverse the levels, collecting crystals and avoiding cannon fire as they go! It has been a lot of fun designing levels in which players have to beat and I believe, much like Marble Run, I’ll be revisiting this in time to flesh it out and add more to play through!

It’s available for download now on the Crystal Cavern page here for Windows and Mac! So why not download it and see whether you can complete the Crystal Cavern!

[robsgamesdesign]

Marble Run on MacOS

I’m happy to announce the MarbleRun download is now available on Mac also!

All the modules of the course will be available for both Windows and Mac.

It wasn’t easy, in order to package for Mac, a Mac is needed, but where there’s a will there’s a way, enjoy!

[robsgamesdesign]

Marble Run

It’s disappointing to not be able to create more blog posts, however I have completed the first module; Marble Run!

You can download and play what I’ve created on my Marble Run page!

It’s quite funny that before I started this course, I wanted to create a maze game, and this module has given a great starting point. I think after this course I can build more into it, I’m looking forward to getting stuck in!

[robsgamesdesign]

Blueprints course!

I have a new exciting announcement to make, which eagle eyed viewers may already know about!

I have started a new course on UDemy; Unreal Engine Blueprints.

With the spare time a lot of us have at the moment, I felt I would put my time into something constructive. This course is bolstering my knowledge and giving me more experience in blueprints!

I will have more blog posts coming soon, watch this space.

[robsgamesdesign]

Civilization VI: Where It Stands. Where It’s Going?

This is a bit of a different post for me, and this blog, but as a lover of the industry, I also have opinions about the news and happenings in the world of games, so maybe there will be more posts like this.

If you know me, you know that I love Sid Meier’s Civilisation VI, so while I’m a little biased, here’s what I think about it, where it currently stands and it’s future!

Where it currently stands

Civilization VI has a new September game update which of course brings bug fixes, balance updates and a new battle royale game mode (Red Death) all for free, for everyone!

Some of the biggest changes in the update are to improve coastal cities and Great Admirals, the great people that unlock great abilities for the player!

As you may imagine, this is a great opportunity for my naval orientated map that I have been creating, Global War-ming as it spices up the gameplay opourtunities.

Red death

This is something no one saw coming but after seeing it on the stream, seems to work really well! A free game mode for everyone who owns the base game, so no DLC is needed to play this.

The game mode flips everything that you traditionally think about Civ, on its head, the game mode is fast paced, dynamic and competitive.

Players have to protect a settler unit that cannot settle cities as they ordinarily do, these serve as the players life, if it is captured the players defeated.

As the game continues, players scour the map, collecting units for their army.

As with all battle royale mode, players avoid a growing “danger” area that kills units, the shrinking “safe” area, increases urgency and causing engagements between the players.

The last player standing is the winner and their settler, transported into space onto a better, less apocalyptic world.

It looks super fun and a killer game mode the games been missing slightly.

Where is Civ going?

As you maybe aware, Civ VI is currently available on PC, Nintendo Switch and iOS. However, currently the PC version is the only version with all the DLC Expansions available to it.

I am truly excited about the future for Civilization VI, as Firaxis has announced that they’re working with Aspyr who are developing the mobile ports to bring all DLC to all Platforms by 2020.

While this next bit is purely my opinion and speculation. I believe that Civilization VI is the best rendition of the game in the series so far and only getting better with constant updates and development, I hope that it continues for a long time!

I hope that this will turn into a multi-platform cross-play experience rather than simply another game in the series, that will be superseded by Civ 7 eventually. Obviously it’ll get to a stage that it’ll probably have to happen. But the games in a really good phase at the moment, it can only grow.

My main complaint is the expenses, it puts players off and even personally, I’m not looking forward to buying the DLC (as I have base game on iOS) again for other platforms. If Civ VI continues to grow and adapt, why not offer a subscription for players to get everything everywhere? Just a thought? Or even a cheaper price if a players already purchased the content elsewhere? The 2K account already manages cloud saves, is it too much of a stretch? Maybe.

With the Play by cloud mode introduced with Gathering Storm which allows you to play an online multiplayer game as and when they want. Instead of grouping a bunch of friend/ opponents/ victims? together in 1 lobby at the same time for the length of time a Civ game can run 6-10+ hours at the same time which is quite tricky!

Instead the game is “hosted” in the cloud and players take their turn when it’s available to them. This dynamic game mode would really lend itself to a multi platform cross play experience. Imagine playing a multiplayer game with some friends traditionally for 4+ hours, you get pretty far into the game, but life interferes, people have to eat, others want to go do something else in life. It happens, but all players want to continue, simply not at that moment. With play by cloud you can switch the game over to this none simultaneous mode and pick up turns as and when you can. imagine; with this on mobile platforms, the games could continue a lot more fluidly!

Your mileage may vary with play by cloud though. It seems that larger games with more players, run a lot slower, something Civ games don’t need. Especially when a single player doesn’t take their turn for a while, it can happen for the best of us.

Sorry for my rant but it’s a dream, for a Civ player, lover and fan, but what do you think, would you be interested in a subscription that gave you Civ VI and all content across all available platforms? Lemme know in the comments!

[robsgamesdesign]

Global War-ming - Completing Main Landmasses - What Have I Created?

Continuing on from the last post Starting To Build Up The Level - Meas… I begin by building up some of the final land masses, these the easiest to mirror as they’re so close to the middle, meaning that I can compare their locations easily!

Using thin strips of water, navies can travel through the area to enter the bays but these are quite defendable positions as they have land either side of them.

Without one way in and out, it avoids too much of a bottleneck, and allows units other routes through.

These land masses closest to the center of the map are generally the closest the player will get to the others quarters while staying in their own.

What makes up these landmasses?

If you aren’t aware, within Civilization VI there are a number of terrains that the land and sea can be made up of, imitating that of earth:

Grassland (dark green)

Plains (light green)

Desert (yellow)

Tundra (brownish-grey/white)

Snow (white)

Coastal (light blue)

Lake (light blue)

Ocean (dark blue)

Each of these offer different benefits to the player and each can also have hills, resources and other modifiers such as flood plains to alter the yields a player will receive from the tile.

What do these terrains do?

Grassland generally has strong yields for food which grows a cities population, allowing more tiles to be worked and making the city more powerful.

Plains has strong yields towards production which allows the city to build things (such as districts, building, units and projects) faster.

Desert on its own has no yields, this makes it good for district placement and certain leaders (special ability may favor desert such as the Mali) to take advantage of.

Tundra can give small yields, again some leaders (such as Russia or Canada) make more use of this terrain.

Snow on its own has no yields similar to desert.

Coastal tiles can be traversed early on into the game with a couple techs (Sailing and Ship Building) and have yields for food and gold generally. These can be useful in Gathering Storm as you can build fisheries and take more advantage of this space.

Ocean has no yields and is generally an obstruction to the player until Cartography is researched, which allows traversal.

Hills and resources

On top of these base yields from terrain, there are some modifiers such as Hills or Floodplains. The Hills add production and the Floodplains add food. Two of the core ingame resources vital for building and growing your empire!

On top of that, there are resources within the game such as Wheat, Fish, Iron and much more. These all add their own yields on top of all the others meaning that resource placement can be an art to make an area not too over powered. Players can also choose to harvest some resources rather than work the resource for large instant injections of yields rather that set yield per turn.

Resources within the game fall under 3 types; Bonus, Luxury and Strategic.

Bonus resources give the player a boost in a certain yield, for example Crabs are good for gold.

Luxury resources affect the cities amenities, one copy of any luxury resource can only ever affect 4 cities amenities, so duplicates are good for trading with other players, these will also provide a yield benefit.

Strategic resources can be used for creating units, this has changed from how base game and the Rise and Fall DLC used these to a stockpile mechanic in the Gathering Storm DLC. Now players spend resources from their stockpile to create Units, before they simply needed a set amount (I believe 2 copies) of them to create a unit. Some strategic resources (specifically Coal, Oil and Uranium) can also be used in factories to create electricity, depleting stockpiles further. Strategic resources also add yields to the base terrain yield.

What am I aiming to do with these?

I have tried to vary the terrain through the map to give variety and will continue to work on a mix of terrains for good city placements.

As I believe I’ve previously mentioned, I’m aiming for the map to be a great naval map, in which players with the strongest navies can control the waters surrounding them.

Often in online multiplayer games players aim to dominate their opponents rush specific techs that are hard to counter with land units that are strong. The beautiful thing about the naval units is that on the water, they’re the most powerful force, so transporting land units on water alone would be precarious.

My hopes are that this promotes an even playing field for longer through the game, however we’ll have to wait and see, player have a knack of exploiting or finding loop holes in things.

The keen eyes of you may have noticed that these land masses aren’t perfectly even, I believe this to be due to the edges of the map. For example bottom left is an outie but bottom right is an innie. As silly as it sounds this has thrown things off slightly and if I were to do this again (which I may well do as I have the quarters template saved) I’d work from the middle out, rather than the corners in.

[robsgamesdesign]

Global War-ming - Starting To Build Up The Level - Measuring, Preparing & Land Mass

I begin creating this map in the Civ VI World Builder which is an in game tool to allow players to create custom maps.

As you can see from the image below, I started by separating out the four quarters of the map with a centeral connecting landmass and the four spokes.

The quarters are separated by mountains and ice which will melt with time through a game. This opens the routes up to players and allow them to clash.

Next I was able to start building the land masses in the quarters that the players will play on. I kept the landmass shape and layout free form and was not going for anything specific other than to encourage the use of naval units.

To encourage this there are areas that would be useful to have a bay or coastal city. Also placing lakes to create a feature the players need to navigate around in the early game but can use for housing starts to create the ideal area for city placements.

I used a variety of terrain types and tried to make the various areas as useful to the players as possible.

Using the Tundra and Desert to separate areas apart and Making certain areas specialised for certain things, for example there’s a hexagon of mountain, ideal for a campus.

I’ve used snow and Tundra tiles in the corners to provide an area where players can create a beach head on an enemies landmass. My thinking is players are less likely to build cities on that land and because of that be less defence in these areas.

One of the major challenges was to mirror the landmass perfectly in each quarter, I tried my best to keep them all the same but it still seems certain quarters have their own quirks.

if I were to do this again o probably wouldn’t have the landmass up against the edge of the map as this seems to be what may have thrown me off on this occasion.

[robsgamesdesign]

Global War-ming - A Strategic Dance - Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Level

Following on from my last Teaser blog post yesterday, this reveals what I’m going to be working on alongside my Colosseum mini project.

Global War-ming is a level I’m creating in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI which utilises the climate change mechanics introduced in the latest Expansion Gathering Storm.

This DLC introduces ice that can melt and reveal new routes to the players dependant on their decisions they take in the game. Basically as you unlock and build certain technologies, resources, units and buildings within the districts, it affects the climate of the map. A by-product of the climate change, the ice within the level that was previously unapproachable melts, allowing units to pass.

To keep players apart, there is an ice & mountain wall with limited bottle necks and routes through to the enemies area. In the center as you can see above is an area that is a bottleneck valuable to a player to capture but hard to grow with. This bottleneck also allows players to defend from incoming forces too and my hopes are that players will have interesting encounters at these bottlenecks.

My vision to keep the level symmetrically and strategically balanced for each player has split the level into four quarters, mirroring each other. The ice and mountain walls split up these quarters and allow each player to grow their economies and forces.

It avoids one player steam rolling the others, hopefully this will avoid individual players growing with strength that the others cannot match. As the ice in the level melts it opens up new routes for players to get through in the seas. My hopes are that this will influence the players enjoying the game that naval supremacy is valuable more than in other levels. I enjoy naval battles in the game and believe that these units can be overlooked quite often as they are only able to traverse the seas.

[robsgamesdesign]

Teaser - Something New This Way Comes

Recently working on Colosseum has been great fun and grown my appetite to do more!

While I will not be finishing Colosseum soon, I will continue to work on this great mini project in my spare time and post more blog posts here.

However this post is about something new, something different, another mini project that I’ve been considering for a while and want to try my hand at!

I have an initial idea and hope to reveal it soon, meanwhile I want to teas whats around the corner and if you know me, you can probably guess what it is.

What do you think it could be? Let me know in the comments below! :)

[robsgamesdesign]

Colosseum - So It Begins - Starting In UE4

I began creating the level in Unreal Engine 4, to kick things off I started using the First Person blueprint and starter content if I need it, but I doubt I will. I began by creating a new level naming it Colosseum, to give me a clean slate to work on.

From here I created the arena in the middle of the map, as everything will surround this element of the level. Using basic shapes for the initial block out of the level, the cylinder BSP brush and making it hollow quickly built the arena walls.

Utilising the scaling tools meant that I could experiment with size, I wanted the walls to seem oppressive to give a player a feeling of no escape. Altering the internal diameter of the cylinder created thick walls, the type you would expect from the ancient Roman gladiatorial wonder of architecture, earning the level name Colosseum.

With this open space I quickly realised that it seemed bland and there was not much going on in the space. This was a great opportunity for the off the cuff level designing to begin. I decided to fill the area with a floating mirrored ball, filling the players view of the area and providing extra peripheral vision of the players surroundings.

With the central arena area blocked out, the surrounding areas will hopefully come quickly. It’s humble beginnings but its been great fun to jump back into UE4 and start the journey!

[robsgamesdesign]

Colosseum - Initial Planning - Bubble Diagram

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts I wanted to keep the design simple, so that I could get into engine and iterate as I created the level itself! This approach allowed me to evolve the level design as it was formed and I hope will create an off the cuff design.

Brain storming

I formed ideas and considered elements I wanted to include for a few days, in my head, it meant that I could quickly consider what I wanted from the level.

I decided on the following:

The level should be symmetrical with large interconnected spaces and different routes for players to take advantage of to get from A to B.

The map should flow and allow players to move quickly without having to spend too much time considering their path or tactics.

I wanted some verticality, for the players to take advantage of their full field of vision, breaking up routes between areas from on one horizontal axis by having areas above and below.

I wanted to try something a little different so instead of using boxes for rooms, right angles and corridors. I decided to go for a spherical design, one that the players could run around infinitely should they wish.

This gave me some initial points to design the layout around, of course while considering this, I had also had ideas for the different areas around the map.

Getting it down on paper (of sorts)

Once I had an initial idea of what elements I wanted in the level, to help me visualise it, I created a simple bubble diagram.

This detailed the different spaces of the level and how they connected to each other. I used different colours to indicate different areas, this also allowed me to write a brief description about them using the colours as a key. This helped me plan the areas names, and what they’re intended for. I found working on my iPad using the built in Notes app sufficient for this, below is a PDF of the initial design I created for Colosseum.

This document helped me move forward with my design as it pulled the ideas from my head, into the real (or digital) world. While I did not want to create a document detailing every aspect of the level, this was ideal as it started me thinking about other questions such as how will these areas connect, where in 3D space these will be and what may go into them.

[robsgamesdesign]

Following advice - Colosseum

Following some advice that I have been given recently, I am starting work on a level design for a team death match map.

I have lots to share with you, and I’m looking forward to showing off what I’ve already got! Some of this work happened before starting this blog, so I just wanted to clarify that before posting about the work to avoid any confusion it may cause.

This map has a working title of Colosseum, hopefully that becomes clear why the more I post about it. I decided to use Unreal Engine 4 for this level as the engine is good for multiplayer levels and I’m familiar with it.

I’m enjoying the work so far and it’s been nice to create something for myself again. I’m aiming to prototype and produce the level quickly and not get bogged down in a design documents. Keeping the scope small and fluid means that I can iterate quickly and design on the fly.

Stay tuned for more posts and news about this mini-project!

[robsgamesdesign]

A new beginning, of the RGD blog!

This is the announcement of my new RGD blog, it’s the beginning but hopefully the start of some interesting and cool stuff!

Here you can find out the latest information about what I am currently working on and its progress. Keep up to date with Robs Games Design by following and viewing my content.

Please bear in mind that this is for work in progress stuff and if I’m honest, this blogging thing is quite new to me but hopefully with time the quality will improve :)

This is only the beginning of the blog, but I do have some stuff that I already want to share with you, I simply have to create the blog posts and back track the progress I already have, expect to see these posts soon (hopefully!)

[robsgamesdesign]

Just a quick update with new assets in the game CommandBase!

Units are in but I am still working on the pawns for those so hopefully, that will be the next update.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately but I’ve been given many much needed hours at work lately so don’t have much free time. However, I have been in contact with someone I have previously worked with and hopefully should have some content from that soon!

[robsgamesdesign]

New job

Hey, sorry for the radio silence lately I've just got a new job to help pay the bills. So I've been a little preoccupied with that but I will try to update this as much as possible.

I do have some things that I need to post, someone shared an article a good while back now on reaction diffusion. Being inspired by some of the interesting stuff coming from such a technique I decided to look into doing it myself.

Long story short I have some interesting patterns that have resulted from it and I want to use them in UE4 to see what I can make texture wise. Stay tuned and I'll try to post something soon! :)