Telepillar

A blog documenting the creation of Telepillar, a game in Unreal Engine 5 by psuth.art.

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Photos from Telepillar's physical popup installation!

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You awaken in a dilapidated laboratory full of exotic technology. Looking down, you realize that your body is a shell of metal and wires. All you have is a vague notion that somewhere, up floors of concrete and decay, is a path out to freedom...

Telepillar is released for realsies this time! I hope you enjoy, it was a great learning experience to make. Check out the official page on itch.io:

Telepillar by psuth.art

A game about a robot.

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Goodbye default Unreal mannequin, hello Mr. Roboto! He is the protagonist we needed and deserved, even if he is a little texturally challenged

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Visit Original Link

Audio construction! To add some audio to Telepillar, I went about recording and constructing an activation click, a teleport sound, and outside ambience. I also composed an ambient background track to accompany the journey, featured above.

My raw sounds were recorded from ominous metal and mechanical sources, as well as some natural moving elements for the important 'outside' ambience.

I used Audacity to edit the waveforms, making distorted sci-fi noises and looping effects. These entered the game space as audio that plays directly as a response to player actions and ambience that varies based on location to enrich the environment.

I also used Ableton Live to compose a simple ambient background track that conveys the vibe of the facility you are exploring.

The main challenge I faced was attempting to implement the background music, as I wanted to have it be continuous between level loads. The conclusion I came to was that in order to facilitate this, I would have to set up the game environment as a level streaming system rather than a directly loading one. In the future I will design with that in mind as an option, but as a working measure I ended up simply having the music fade and resume at a random point to provide variance if not continuity.

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Documentation of character and animation importing for Unreal! I selected this faceless alien lad as my model and successfully put together idle, walking and running animations for him to blend through based on motion. The process is surprisingly simple, all things considered, although the fine details of how to polish the transitions between animations eluded me.

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Telepillar, my first Unreal Engine project, is ready to play! (But not yet complete.) The game can be downloaded here:

Download Telepillar (OneDrive)

The main purpose of this project was to gain experience in Unreal Engine, and to that end it was very successful. I think this version works conceptually and has value on its own as a playable experience. Given more time there are more elements that I could add to polish the overall feel, but the essential components to achieve my vision are all realized as is.

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A progress update on the game Telepillar!

Project Statement: A small-scope 3D puzzle-solving game with a focus on atmosphere.

Vision Statement: A journey to explore the unknown and reach the outside world.

From the last build going into the first finished version, I am adding and tweaking a variety of features. In addition to textures and lighting effects that enhance the environment, important supporting elements such as visual guides and sound effects will also be present. The addition of props and level detail are also important parts of the game's silent narrative. Importantly, this build will also feature an ending that ties together the game's themes and provides a conclusive finish to the experience of playing.

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Puzzle game progress. Featuring the base mechanics of teleporting, pushing around blocks, selective barriers, and multiple connected levels. Also some fun lighting and material stuff.

Link to Windows Build

This has been a very productive exercise in learning how to work with Unreal - I might polish off this prototype to make it something complete in the future or just move on to a new project with the skills I've learned from it.

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Puzzle game concept prototype. Featuring most of the base mechanics, such as movable blocks that teleport you between them and selective barriers that allow the blocks through but not you. Next up is adding more types of blocks and barriers to introduce the sequential puzzle logic.

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Insane scrawlings (design docs) for a simple puzzle game.

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I'm done with Unreal. The game engine of the future is flickgame

You can find my latest masterpiece at this link

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Some updated views of the ruined mission in-engine.

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Results of modeling exercises in Blender. It's a very powerful tool, and pretty intuitive considering how complex it is. Featuring the classic donut and chair 3D modeling staples.

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No more mister nice guy

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Modeling a structure! My goal was to make a ruin of an adobe cathedral that feels kind of monumental and grand. Unreal's tools for this are pretty robust, especially for organic shapes like melting adobe, which is nice. My reference was the mission ruins at Los Pecos, which was a good starting point that I exaggerated and built off of. I think that once it has textures, materials and a proper environment, it'll look really nice and make a good space for play.

Tools used were shape placing, vertex sculpting, smoothing and flattening, lattice deformation, displacement, union, bevel... I really just ended up using most of them to figure out how they work.

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Endrose Lookbook!

The basic lookbook for Endrose (provisional title). This document is meant as a basic overview of what's going on - there's a lot of other ideas I have about the universe and how it'll translate into a game, but those will come later.