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.