Alice of the Map: Project Post-Mortem

Project brief:

In teams of six create a level to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of ‘Alice’s adventures underground’ by Lewis Carroll, choosing from three categories of either Underground, Oxford or Gardens. 
Anchor your work in the British Libraries collections.  

Project Duration:

11 Weeks

Brief overview of the project:

Starting the project in our allocated teams when began with basic research and inspiration before going onto level planning. Everyone came up with some ideas and we took parts of things we liked and mixed them together to produce our basic layout.

The environment modelling was divided up between myself, Mark, Anya and Becky while Dom worked on the engine and Denise worked on the characters. We created an asset list and divided the work up amoungst us and updated it was we went on and completed work so everyone could keep track.

We also all had access to the Max file full of assets used in the whitebox and a block to represent player height so we could all work independently but quickly where the scale of our assets were concerned meaning we didn't lose time later on returning to rescale our assets since they were fairly close to the correct size already. 

Meanwhile Denise dealt with the character side and Dom with the game play and scripting.

Our teamwork was pretty good and consistent. We tried to keep up with team meetings and give regular feedback. The project was fairly well managed having a set timetable and naming convention and I think an even distribution of work was the only thing that could have used improvement.

What went well:

Overall the 'Fable-esk' style guide we planned from the start was fairly consistent, none of the assets seems too stick out as too cartoony or too realistic and no colours used were particularly garish. The level felt cohesive in regards to our art.

There was a lot of variety in terms of game play. There were six different playable puzzles as well as an optional collectible system and all these features didn't feel forced in or out of place since they were either referenced in the actual book such as the White Rabbits gloves, painting the roses red or the Hatter and his riddles or there was just enough logic behind them that they seemed to fit, like the guard losing his key.

Overall organisation was good. People were almost never sat around with nothing to do, we had the objects from the whitebox to keep us in scale which was efficient and we had a set naming convention for the files so everything was easy to navigate.
  
What didn't work:

In my own opinion while I do like the 'Dark World' tea party level it received less attention than the rest of the game. In terms of atmosphere we got what we wanted but I felt we were very liberal with the glowing plants. They seem a bit everywhere.

This was one of the problems people who played through the game for us told me about, there doesn't seem to be much direction in this area and people automatically want to follow the glowing objects as a type of path. Naturally the flowers are scattered like plants in a forest would be so they wouldn't exactly get led anywhere. I think we could have been a bit more strategic with the emissives, such as using them as a 'hot and cold' system to help people locate the riddle items, the further from a item the flower is the dimmer it will glow. This would be very beneficial to a player who is unaware of where the items were placed and help prevent the puzzle becoming tedious as people search for things.

The miniature maze puzzle could also have benefited from some tweaking. The original plan was for the maze to be a rabbit warden under the flower bed but we encountered problems making the walls stand out from the floor. In the end the quickest solution was to leave the textured as a miniature hedge maze though people still had some problem keeping track of where Alice was once she was in the maze.  

Problems encounted:

I had a lot of problems regarding the hedges and getting a balance between ascetics and engine efficiency. Having tried various solutions including tessellation, adding geometry, normal maps, it was decided that leaving the hedges as simply textured meshes with a material to add colour variation was the best solution for us to take.

A large and recurring problem we also faced was with frame rate. Aiming for a minimum FPS of 30 at times we were hitting as low as 9 as we started putting in foliage. A massive about of time and energy went into fixing this, such as reducing the dynamic lighting to the bare minimum, cutting down the number of plants in the forests, revisiting assets such as the trees to thin out the alphas and make changes to reduce overdraw, lowering the quality of the shadow and many other things. This was one of the biggest challenges we faced throughout this project. 

At the end of the project our lighting build was plagued with problems and crashes. After four days of trying we could only get the build to work on preview lighting. Meanwhile in Dark world level kept giving up a 'Insertion failed' error and nobody has any idea what this is so currently we have no way to building the lighting in that area of the level.

What I would do next time:

Work faster. The distribution of work got every uneven towards the end and a lot of this was from people finishing work and taking on more. My work speed is something I have been trying to improve since first year and I need to continue to do so.

Be a better judge of tri-count. I have a somewhat different problem with tri-count than most in that quite a lot of the time I never use enough. While optimising our assets is always important as the game engines get more powerful there are a lot of instances of me sacrificing form for no reason, especially with round objects.

Conclusion:

I did like the level, it was a fairly lengthy gameplay experience for people who hadn't worked on it or previously seen us play it. It relates well to the story of Alice in Wonderland and altogether I think it looks good.

The team worked well, there were no major disagreements or in-fighting, everyone showed up usually everyday anyway but if not would come in when needed and while I wish I'd done more there were no cases of nobody not really contributing. Overall the level is a good example of what a good team dynamic can produce in comparison to the last group project I was part of where it was rather dysfunctional.
 
Action Plan:
I have a lot of areas I want to improve on over the summer. I want to get much more proficient with all the programs that I've used over the course of this project.  

Zbrush and Polypainting. Zbrush is a unbelievably useful tool and I want to keep getting better with it so I can produce better quality hi-poly bakes. I've used it throughout the Off the Map project and intend to improve with it further. Zbrush is also a program used widely through the industry so I consider it a necessary skill set.

Blueprints: In the projects leading up to Alice project I'd been working a lot with Unreal and Blueprints but the Alice project had me having next to no contact with them. I plan to allocate time to learning more about them.

Practicing 2D skills: Naturally I should always be allocating time to improving my 2D work but I have neglected them somewhat this year. Most of my time I will be working to get back to the level I was then continue to improve. After that I must make a conscious effort for the skills to not slip again.
During the early stages on this project I felt fairly useless because of the speed and quality of my concepting. I want to be much more prepared and capable ready for FMP.

Portfolio Pieces: Utilising any improvements I make from my other points I hope to produce a fair selection of portfolio ready pieces. As I said in my extended writing piece environment art is one of my areas of interest so I intend to create work demonstrating skills in this area.

And so Alice woke up and the Game Art students finally went to sleep. The End.

Looks like we made it. Just about.

There wasn't even a wave of relief at the end of this, just a load of stressed students eyeing the computers suspiciously like it couldn't actually be true.

It was a somewhat stressful conclusion, problems naturally started appearing that needed to be fixed. I came in and Dominic had me play through a couple of times for suggestions and to spot any issues, we spotted a few minor fixes then I found two game breakers.

The first being the collectible tart in front of the rabbit hole. I found while fooling around a little that if you jump right you can grab the tart as you enter into the rabbit hole, which will promptly crash the game. We guessed it was caused by the script trying to register the pick up and store it to be reloaded on the way back while loading the next level. So, to avoid it happening to a player we moved the tart safely out the way. 

Next up was with the riddle puzzle over in the Dark World. On my second play through of it I had some trouble picking up the bag of marbles and ended up kicking them through the world, breaking the puzzle and trapping Alice in the dark world with the Mad Hatter which does not bode well for the girl's future. So Dom scripted in a respawn for the pieces should they fall below a certain height on the map.

These were problems I found when I was just trying to play the game, the real headaches came when we asked classmates to play and their soul agenda was to break it. They well and truly put the blocking volumes to the test, which held up in the main level but once again the dark world proved tiresome.

Firstly one of them walked off straight down the river and wandered off into the black, empty abyss that would have been the gardens in the main level. After that they just started being all out destructive.

My mistake was assuming they'd play the puzzle, that was a foolish thought. Everyone proceeded to pick up the objects and swing them around the screen, attempted to throw them over the blocking volumes and into the woods, onto the roof of the house and naturally they flung the pieces through the world and across the map. Kicking them through the map wasn't a huge issue since I'd already found that but when they throw the marbles blindly around the area finding them becomes a very 'needle in haystack' situation. One player was particularly skilled at breaking things (looking at you Emily!) and after lobbing a vase at the Mad Hatter what happened could only be described as the Hatter activated a bubble shield. In reality what actually happened was they had actually managed to pick up the sphere volume around the Hatter that registers if you're carrying an item and this disabled player overlap so we couldn't get near the Hatter to finish the puzzle and Alice was doomed to her fate once again. Dom fixed that.

We went through several of these wonderful encounters and while every problem they managed to create was actually helpful since we could try and address the issue, it didn't make me want to beat them with the keyboard any less.

Then came the bane of all our lives for about four days.

Even with repeated attempts on several computers and even a couple of ritual sacrifices the lighting did not want to bake. It just kept crashing at random intervals leaving us stuck, confused and all together fed up. The only solution to be found was to bake on preview lighting which by Friday afternoon it was agreed was better than nothing.   

The end of the week we were taken out of action by documentation so that was end of working on the level for now.

So the project comes to a close. They team did great and I'm impressed with what we achieved in the end. I would like to have done more in terms of my own contribution but overall I feel the project was a success.

    

Endless saving cycles

The university computers seem to be as tired as us by this point. Most of our time this week was stolen by 20 minute saving processes and an opportunist autosave destined to make our life hell by triggering a save whenever we took our eyes off the screen for a moment. Among this we were also plagued by crashes.

This made Dominic's job much more difficult from not only having to work out scripting but having to do it while battling the engine but late this weekend he got the level fully playable and all the puzzles working.

There was finally a return to the second level map for the Hatter's 'Dark World' tea party which hadn't really been touched since the start of the project. Most of this was copying over the tea party laid out in the main level then creating emissive textures for the plants and altering a few things but the atmosphere was pretty much sorted from the second week.

I worked with some of Mark's textures to create masks for the mushrooms so we could apply glowing patterns to the meshes. I did some testing in a separate Unreal file, battling save times along the way, to see if I could come up with a slightly more interesting material other than a basic glow. Remembering a strange material I made back in container city I managed to get a panning material that faded in and out across the mask patterns but the emissive would always come out are green. After a far did of time looking through nodes I thought might help I found one for distance work that had the side effect of mixing shades of blue into the colour. It wasn't quite what I wanted but the results were interesting regardless. 

I also got some low poly rocks sorted out. Not completely sure if they'll get used in the level but they were good practice. Though unfortunately the really nice poly painted texture got absolutely destroyed once it was lowered down to a 512x512 but on the plus size the normals bake came out really nice after a few problems in XNormal which led to me giving up and just projection mapping it,

So onto the final stretch there's a few things to polish, puzzles to stress test and lighting to build, we're hoping for a good final week but this is Game Art so we fully expect the level to simply burst into flames next week. 

Damn it ZBrush work with me here!

We had a quick introduction to Zbrush from a 3rd year before Easter so I've been trying to put those notes to use and create some stepping stones to try and get to grips with sculpting and Polypainting. So starting from a simple base mesh over in 3D Studio and then over in ZBrush painting in some texture and a diffuse map I got this.

Nothing incredible I know but it was a start and I was only making a stepping stone which is what I got out of it.

So since I was obviously on my way to being a ZBrush master I thought I'd try something else and picked up the rocks from the asset list that were meant to be Dominic's models but the level scripting were given more priority. So I tried a couple of new things for these, first off I went straight into ZBrush without a low poly based mesh something I felt from the start would spin around and bite me but we'll get to that. With no based mesh I instead started using ZSpehres to get my basic shape and went in after with the planar brush to define the forms.

Pretty sure I over worked it. It would work for a more stylised world I think but I'm working from a Fable based style guide and their forms are a lot smoother and not quite so busy.

Regardless I keep working with it, it's rare I use my first model for anything but practice and testing anyway. I added wear and damage to the edges and surface and neatened it up using a morph target which is a stored copy of the model in an undamaged state so if I think I've taken too much off somewhere I can use a morph brush to put more of the original form back into it to lessen the damage. Finally I added noise to the surface and I had a pretty decent first attempt at a rock.

Then I hit the low poly problem. I decimated the mesh and brought the tri count down but the topology was a mess. I know in organic shapes we can be forgiven for triangles but this thing had never seen a quad in it's life. I tried to retopologise in ZBrush but the tri count would skyrocket then brought it into Max to see if I could do anything by hand. In the end it wasn't working, Pro Optimiser did it's best and I tried to clean up after it but in the end the base shape was changing too much and there wasn't a hope that this would match the Hi poly model enough to bake out the normal map cleanly so I'm thinking that it's best to put this one down as a fail and when I go back to try again, this time I'll be producing my low poly first. 

In the level there's been a pretty simple yet effective change. From this:

To this:

The switch to evening lighting was probably one of the best decisions we've made in the project. The light shines through the trees better, the colours work better with the environment and colours of the flowers pop more.

I also got some decorations finished this week.

And used the ribbon, sash...thing to decorate the fences in the garden.

The main things left now are mostly scripting to finish and a few small things such as sounds. We're getting there. 

Is it too late to have our level set in the desert?

Trees! Of course it's the trees because trees were sent to punish game artists for their sins. We got back this week and located one of the main problems with our lag and frame rate issue which turned out to be the alphas on the trees, the water shader is also pretty engine heavy but it mainly the trees fault. So what's the solution to that? Less leaf planes altogether or try to maintain the look of density by putting more branches onto the alpha planes. Regardless either on off these options mean revisiting the trees and changing them again.

So we've located the problem, that's a start. As for the level...

Looking pretty good I think. The work everyone did over the Easter went in, Dominic's been working on scripting in the puzzles and the end is in sight but we still have pretty big to do list and there are some things we've accepted probably won't get done for the DMU hand in such as having the Mad Hatter over at the tea party but we aren't too worried about that.

Importing the palace brought up the Unreal 'Degenerate tangent base' error but after all the trouble when had with this and Mark's archway we were prepared for it this time. Back over in 3D Studio I simply attached the palace to a quickly drawn box mesh, deleted the box and re-exported the palace and all fixed. There was still an incorrect shading issue but I fixed that by increasing the light map resolution up from 64 to 128.

The main worry is that it's not completely playable yet, some puzzles aren't in and so the game isn't set up to let you into the gardens or end the game so that's our biggest problem currently. This is all Dominic's work since this is a level of scripting at is just sailing over our heads so we can't even help. He assures us it will be done and he's fast and good at it so we aren't particularly concerned.

This week was also the presentations so that was..something. I'd spent all Easter worrying what I could present at would be three minutes of cool and funny information, then I remembered that I'm a art history and Ancient Greek civilisation nerd and really should just embrace that. So I gave a presentation on the three stages of Greek sculpture, though an extremely butchered one as fitting an era into under a minute is harder than I expected but it went ok, my timings were mostly on track and I didn't have to throw up afterward so a big improvement on last year at least. 

Everyone else gave a good show too, lots of broad subjects and I left with new knowledge of the genetics of horse colouration and a few more interesting facts about slugs under my belt so in my eyes, it was a good day.

Still hate trees

I finally got around to fixing that awful tree I made to make it a slightly better looking awful tree. Still can't get the flowers to pop from all the green leaves but they're there if the player gets close.

There are a few things left to make for it, like the stages of LODs we have in the level to try and help our frame rate out but that's work for back at the labs because I'm not making trees on my birthday. Now lightmaps on the other hand.....

I may have eaten my chocolate early

I'm not completely sure when Easter is but the result was the same, I once again have no chocolate.

I had hoped to get all my work out of the way by the second week but I was instead challenged to a Ninja throwing fight on Saints row 3 and everybody knows it would be dishonorable to not accept.
I wasn't quite so idle this week. Got that the texture for the remodeled palace done.

I also made some really small changes to my character project based on the feedback I received. The feedback was pretty minimal, 'add more contrast to the colours'. What I'd done so far gotten me a score in the low 50's so I was left wondering if contrasting colours were all I needed to change...where are those other 50 points? But I did what I could without feeling like it was damaging the dichotomy of the colours, neatened up some topology and added some extra finger loops for better deformation.

Again, not much was changed at all. I put some trim on their shirt patterns using their opposing colours, made the bishop symbol on their crowns a shade of the opposite colour too and altered some on the contrast slightly so none of their whites and pure white and the blacks aren't pure black. I did also give Stonewall fingerless gloves to break his arm up a bit more since it doesn't differentiate in shape as much as Gambit's.

I don't expect my marks to change by much if they change at all but it gave me a chance get some better renders of them than the ones I initially had and I fixed some mistakes I over looked in my naming convention so who knows, maybe there's a point or two in there somewhere. 

 

What week is it again?

All the weeks are blurring together. At least six people have greeted me with 'you look like crap' instead of the traditional 'good morning'...thanks guys. I spent this week doing various odd jobs, as promised I painted the texture for the fence.

I painted a poster to help explain to the player why the world is populated by floating, shiny jam tarts. These were an idea I came up with way back in the level planning stage as a way to help guide the player and allowing us to get some more of the book into the game. This and the pick up is a reference to this poem: 

The Queen of Hearts

She made some tarts,

All on a summer's day;

The Knave of Hearts

He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.

Hopefully on her way to the palace Alice will find all the missing tarts and be able to exonerate the Knave, saving him from a rather ridiculous and clearly bias trial.



The last few days of term were just small jobs, fixing assets, tweaking textures and correcting a couple of collision meshes.

The team got together to organise what was left to do in the level. Things like a menu system, controls. We decided how some of the cutscenes would work and discussed a way to make use of all the parts of the final garden. I suggested having a guard at the locked gate having broken and lost his key so now the player has a reason to complete the large fountain jumping puzzle and visit the other gardens.

"Can I interest you in a microtransaction?"

There was also an industry visit this week from Creativity Assembly about their summer internship which sounds like a dream offer but I've already set the summer aside for sorting out a proper portfolio and website. I did however download one of their mobile games to get a look at some of their work and long story short I developed a camaraderie with the Ninja who is now slowly draining my bank account with micro-transactions....and couldn't look more pleased about it if he tried.

There's also critical studies work to be done over the Easter, first off a essay about our career aspirations and progress this year which I'm not eager to get on with. I am not the greatest author the world has ever seen, so that should be fun. There's also a presentation, 3 minutes on anything we want, so I also have to locate something to talk about to an audience while using all the willpower I have in my body to not throw up.


Well lots of work still to do over Easter but first, sleep.



    

My Kingdom for a coder right now

Towards the end of the week I walked into class for my team mate to tell  me the level was broken but he said it with a smile so there was a good two minutes of awkward blinking confusion before I realised that the level was in fact broken. Not the 'there's problems here, here and here' broken but the 'This isn't opening correctly and even if it does open it crashes when we try to change anything'. Yeah, that kind of broken.

Luckily before we gave up and reverted to an older save file or more likely, all jumped in the river Soar it was discovered that it turned out to be mix up with level streaming and ignoring the 'fatal error' messages we get that we're currently pretending aren't there that got resolved but that doesn't make us problem free. Issues in the level are still springing up, mainly with the frame rate which has been an thorn in our side for quite some time now. We're getting 15-25 fps and lower at times like when you're standing in the woods.

Speaking of woods, tree time. I've been putting this one to the back of my asset list as long as I could manage but at some point I'm just going to have to suck it up and get it done. Tell the hedges I'm sorry for the things I said about them, at least they aren't trees...well they are trees but you caught my drift.

 So my tree from the list of native UK plant life I researched was a crab apple tree which not only grows very densely with lots of little leaves but also likes to bloom with bright pink or white blossoms before it grows it's apples. Basically I had no idea how to approach this. Trees can turn very high poly very quickly if you don't watch your modelling and it's a tree that naturally grows dense so my options to me seemed to be, number 1 which was lots of alphas, a whole bunch of them or number 2, which is to put more leaves and branches on the alpha. I tried method 2 but it looks really odd when you look up at the branches. So now there's option 3, which is try to find a balance between the two first options and hope for the best.





As I thought I would, I did have trouble getting the density I needed but a move annoying issue I had was that I can't get the blossoms to show up against the green of the leaves. I make the branches with a high ratio of flowers to leaves, I've tried the flowers in different shades of pink but the green always overpowers it.

I plan to leave it for now and return when I've gotten some of my other assets done because it's started to drive me a little bit mad.

I hate trees

Back in the Hedgerows I go

Ah those hedges again, they'd been so well behaved and out the way I was beginning to forget about them but time to pay them a visit again but for something more interesting this time at least.

Well first there were some changes to make. Since the gardens are pretty much finalised now it's easier to have the hedge walls as a solid mesh rather than all the separate modular pieces so a quick export from Unreal as a reference so the scaling would be right and a few tweaks in 3DS max, followed by the traditional needless crash for a menial task again the first job is quickly done. Then it was onto something more interesting.

Hedge shapes! These were actually a lot of fun to make and the shapes were based off the historical gardens from the British library pictures.

This was mainly all spline work, some of the more swirling patterns were extruded along a spline but with the slightly blocker shapes like the middle on I'd made flattened silhouettes of the shapes from the books and drew around them with a spline and extruded from it instead. While this meant an accurate shape it left a fair bit to do by hand to bring down the try count and clean up the topology.

Once all that was done I then just started playing with the symmetry modifier to see what interesting shapes I could get out of three basic starting pieces.

Mark also added a fence piece running along the outside which helps further separate the cared for gardens from the forest left to it's own devices. 

  

I should really stop modelling and do some texturing

This week I modeled the palace again, and some fences and a collectible jam tart...they'll get textured I promise.

In fact the tart is already textured. It doesn't look as delicious as I was aiming for but then again it's a collectible pick up so even if it did look good enough to eat Alice shouldn't be eating off the forest floor anyway. I tried to get sub surface scattering in the engine to make the jam look a little more transparent and make the material a bit more realistic. I did succeed but there was a side effect of it glowing purple which was just a bit hard to overlook.


Over with the others in the engine file a lot has gone on and things are looking good.

While I'm really missing working in the engine it's always nice to get a look at it after a little while and see everything that's changed and watch it slowly come together.

As I mentioned before I made a fence which I'm currently avoiding texturing as I hand painted some bark a couple days ago and my brain has yet to recover from my fools decision to be ridiculously detailed about it so just a model for now. Mark then told me he'd like to be able to set up areas of broken fence in places so I went in a pulled some parts out so he'd have a set of more versatile pieces.

Over the Hedges

Do you know how long I spent looking at hedges this week? Too long. Longer than any human can do so while staying sane. The worst of it begin after that of it there didn't seem to be that much of a compromise to my problem which was 'how the hell do you make a game hedge look good?'.

If it wasn't clear I've been making a modular hedge kit this week, so we can piece the gardens together however we want or change it around if need be.

I find modular kits are usually fun to make, hedges less so. I looked at a lot of games to get a look at their approach and they range from boxes with textures slapped on them to strange meshes within meshes. In the end it was decided chamfered edges and the texture would be enough and if it looks a did flat we can pretend the palace gardener is pedantic about keeping the shrubbery trimmed.  

That was only half the fun as Mark and I sent a good couple of hours trying to get the texture sorted. Tiling a leaf texture can be bad enough but we also had to dedicate a big chunk of time trying to chase down and stamp out a bit of shading information that made it look like there were big claw marks running across the surfaces. It's surprising how well an error can manage to hide, especially surprising because it was only on a 512.

Thankfully that fight came to an end and we were able to get some hedges into the whitebox to start getting a feel for the palace gardens. I noticed they are still very obviously tiling so I suppose technically this round goes to the hedge texture but at least in Unreal 4 we can set up the material to apply variations and make it less noticeable. 

Speaking of Unreal 4 it updated to 4.7 this week and with it brought improved foliage shaders and for the other members of my team it was like their prayers had been answered since I know they've been having a lot of trouble convincing the trees and grass to shade correctly.

So all in all the vegetation has been on and off this week. 

I also got around to reconcepting the palace after our tutor deemed it to not be 'Oxford enough'. So this time around I looked at Blenheim palace in Oxfordshire and used pictures to create a Photoshop Frankenstein's monster to work off. I still really liked Anya's original design so I tried to keep any details I could with it.

Before and After

 So need to get around to remodeling that at some point too. That's pretty much been my life this week, hedges aren't the most exciting things in the world but the technical side of the modularity helps. Plus should these guys ever decide to work on a sequel I think I have a shot at the job.

But yeah in all seriousness hedges suck.

This Way That Way

We had a group meeting with tutors this week and during it we finally picked a team name! It's been a long time coming and some interesting options were passed up, to name a few:

Shark in the Hedge

Rabbit in the Basement

Alice in the Basement

Gothulus Rift: The Legacy 

Alice in Oculand

Penguins on a Treadmill

The last one led to a fairly lengthy discussion on how penguins deal with falling over and it turns out the answer is some kind of super powered jelly spine.

But the name we settled in the end was 'This Way That Way' after the ever so useful sign from Alice in Wonderland which is also a feature in our level. As well was this we covered trying to stick to our style guide a bit better. I went to gather some reference for us to refer to and that meant I got to spend game playing a game! Not in the way I would have liked, not so much going on adventures more so ignoring everything going on in Fable 3 and screen capping the chairs.

Meanwhile a member of every team when on their own information gathering mission but I'm guessing it involved less shooting Hobbes with magic than mine did. They headed down to London to visit the British library, got some questions answered and brought back reference material so I think we're good on the research front for now....probably until next week anyway.

This weeks meeting with the tutors also saw the creation of a detailed and currently finalised asset list so with everything divided up the team we're all getting down to it. The others in the team seem to move through their work really quickly, they've already got a whiteboxed level thrown together and assets are getting swapped in as they're completed. Everyone seems really proficient and confident in what they're doing and I'm hoping I'll be able to keep up rather than run myself into the ground trying.  

A palace fit for a Queen of Hearts

Second week into the off the map project and there's still concepting going on along side some modelling. We've got a basic time line and work schedule sorted to be improved once the final asset list in complete.

Over with the level the whitebox is all set up and we're using it to keep our models to scale with each other, by exporting the place holders from the engine into max so the assets will be the correct sizing for their location. It's saving a lot of time and effort.

Whitebox screenshots

This week I also started modelling some assets, starting with the palace of the Queen of Hearts that would sit in the distance behind an inaccessible part of the gardens. Working from Anya's concept for the palace I modeled in the basic shapes in and planned to texture in most of the details. Since the player would never be able to get close it wasn't a concern of it not looking real close up. Since it was just a set piece it only needed faces that could be seen so it has no back faces at all the save the tris.

  
I also discovered modeling hearts is a huge pain but not as big a pain as the surrounding peers who did not miss a chance of mockery for sitting in a computer room the day before Valentines day making hearts.

As for the engine the others have started trying to sort out water shaders and starting on getting foliage into the engine. Last I checked there was a bit of trouble with the lighting on the grass and it wasn't reacting to the areas that are in shadows which is naturally a bit of a problem. The others seem to have found a workaround for now but hopefully there's a better solution somewhere.

https://anyadmuga.wordpress.com

There's also a feature going into the level based on my favorite of Anya's concepts. We have a mad hatter tea party set up across the river that is accessed via a rabbit hole which will move the player to a new level which is a darker, subverted version the party. I think the change in colour pallet will be a good change of pace from the bright colours of the rest of the level and a chance to alter the lighting and make something interesting.

Next week I plan to get the hedges finished up and get started on my next round of assets. The level itself is starting to get populated and other than a few engine problems things seem to be going alright to far, knock on wood of course.

Alice’s Adventures off the Map

After the months preparing us for the trials, tribulations and benefits of group work it’s finally time for the Off the Map project and this year we’re working to create something to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of ‘Alice’s adventures underground’ by Lewis Carroll, choosing from three categories of either Underground, Oxford or Gardens.  

It's the third year of the British Library competition and DMU seem very keen as win or place as runners up as I'm sure we all are considering years later anything to do with Off the Map still brings searches to DMU's first winners, Pudding Lane productions. So the hope is to do well, put our skills so far to the test and hopefully get some good work out there. 

Everyone was allocated a team in an attempt to see that every team had a member that wanted to cover a certain area of the design process, so concepting, environment art, engine work ect.
Of the group I was placed in I'd only worked with one of them before but I'd seen the quality of work the others had produced in the past and while skilled teammates is a very good thing, it can be pretty intimidating so it's going to be a lot of energy to get myself to stay confident.  
As for the project itself, it was originally introduced as a sidescroller so we began our researching into that until we received an email to tell us the sidescroller was no longer mandatory at which point the team decided they would prefer a first person game and focus switched to that.

For this, the general idea is exploration with puzzles and mini games. One of the team has experience with Source code and is really good at working with the engine Blueprints so even though I had wanted to do some work with the engine myself there's pretty much nothing in my skill set that he probably doesn't already know, on the plus side I get to see some fairly complex Blueprints and how they work.
So for the first day we set about basic research and idea generation, we vocalised some ideas before going away as individuals to sketch some of our own plans to come back and compare. From what the others had said I thought it would be good to start on an area of higher elevation as it would allow us to give the player a direct line of sight over to the end of the map with their final goal and it would then let the player look down on the path they would be travelling.

Since our designs also have to grounded in the book, 'grounded' probably being the wrong word for anything related to Alice in Wonderland, everybody also had to have read the text. This led to a very odd day of relative silence in the labs as the majority of Game art students sat down and read a book. This also led to me finding what is possibly one of my favorite illustrations in the world with one of most displeased expressions I have ever come across.

By the end of the second day we seemed to have had our basic layout completed, it could probably have used more iterations but it did fit into what we needed and we could always make changes if need be. So from the map sketch I generated a quick version in Photoshop to get the key areas and landmarks that needed concepting down. While our concept artists started work on the major areas other person started on a whitebox in Unreal 4 so we could get a feel for scale and look as well as having something more accurate to work from for future concepts.

Meanwhile since the category we had selected was 'Gardens' I started on blocking out some modular pieces for hedgerows, to create a set of assets that we could clip together to create garden layouts.

So this week we've started settling down into the project and we seem to have a good foundation for the coming weeks and I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Container City Project Review

This has been a pretty odd week of having so much to do yet nothing to do. Having completed our stuff back in week 3, Becky and I have spent most of this week looking for things to add and improve in the level which by this point was only half finished as we waited on the other half of the team to finish up with their assets and textures. For a group project there wasn't much of a group for most of it, communication hasn't been the best so Becky and I didn't know if there was anything we could help with to speed up the process so we kept ourselves busy where we could. Becky set up an awesome menu screen and pause function.

As well as that she got sounds hooked up to my blueprints and matinees, worked on her plant textures with subsurface scattering, worked on the post processing and a vast range of other work that she needs a pat on the back for. As for myself I was doing odd jobs: 

• Arranging the asset files for submission 
• Setting up a mesh and material to cast more controllable Godrays 
• Getting the level to fade in from black when you start playing 
• Fade out to black at the end
• Adjusting the timelines in the blueprints
• Overall troubleshooting

I'd added a slight flicker to the powering on of the emergency lights for a touch of realism but in the last few days we found that at random times when someone was playing through the level this would cause the lights to not stay on so I spent a good while troubleshooting that but to no avail, I have no idea why is does that so I had to settle for a sight delay instead. While we were waiting for the last bits of work to go in we also got a lot of opportunities for people to play through it and give us feedback or see what could be done based on how people played.

We had many on occasion where people would jump to try and save themselves from the collapsible floor so we made sure there was a blocking volume to hinder their escape and avoid the chance they they would just break the level. Another common one was that once people reached the final room they would want to get through the door I had left ajar to help lead them towards the drop floor so if nothing else other than to amuse myself at their disappointment I set the door to slam shut on them if they interacted with it. 

As for my area of the level I was happy with the atmosphere and people who played through said it was an area that unnerved them which is a reaction I was pleased to get through I had a lot of trouble trying to balance the lighting. I had each lamp with a point light to illuminate the area and a spot light to reflections I wanted on the surface of the water but when I adjusted them the scene was either too dark or too lit and I couldn't seem to hit an in between but I think the red works with the colours of the walls and the yellow of the pipes like I planned so overall I do like my lightening even if there might be a bit much of it. 

Meanwhile Becky's greenhouse is looking awesome and we finally got the windows to be translucent enough to pass for windows and not wooden boards but opaque enough that you couldn't make out enough outside them to see there was nothing there. That had proven to be quite the uphill struggle.

As for the rest of the level I'm not as happy with. I'm glad we got it finished and working but the fact we didn't see much of the others meant we didn't see much of their work until we were too close to the deadline to make any real changes. Some of the biggest problems with this was there wasn't time to check for consistency so some assets look too cartoony or some textures look too clean so they don't sit in the scenes as well. Having everyone there might have been useful for the other major problem I have with our level which is how anticlimactic the ending feels, since it went in so late there wasn't much we could do once it was there and we went 'Crap. It doesn't work'. It's very visually diminishing having passed through the bright greenhouse and the intense red in the lower levels to a pretty boring standard room with not much too it. Until the last couple of days the only thing we had to go on for the ending room was the concepts for it and when the final product appeared and didn't really resemble the concept we weren't exactly sure what could be done from that point and had to let it go.

There are a lot of improvements that could be made but interactions and a lot of the assets of pretty polished I'd say. A play through of the final level can be viewed here.

Considering it was a group project I wish there'd been a bit more of a group dynamic for it, with half the group absent from the labs most of the time there weren't many ideas or problem solving beyond the scope of Becky and I so there were probably a lot of cool things that could have gone in that we might have missed but this project is done now and time to move on. 

Overall it's been an interesting exercise in level design and patience....mostly patience.