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.

Container City. Level design Week 3

I got the rest of my share of the assets done this week. There wasn't much to be done since I'm working on the lower level which is fairly sparsely populated when it comes to unique assets.

I tried to keep everything as low poly as I could since it would mostly be in the dark and dim lighting.

I'm not pleased with the textures, the generator is the largest unique asset in my part of the level and so it really should have a lot more texture space but Becky and I haven't been able to get in touch with the other team members for a few days now and haven't been able to find out how many of the 10 maps we're permitted for this project they've used. Since I couldn't contact them this week I decided it was safer to make the best of one texture sheet than to potentially risk not seeing them in time to change anything before the hand in and have assets using a one we can't submit.

This week I also got the lighting system working in the lower levels so when the player falls down into the unlit tunnels they can hit an emergency switch and the red lighting will all power on. This took up most of my time this week.

I made sure all the doors had a matinee to open and close them and I started a timeline to connect up to the gate blueprint so it doesn't slide out of the way quite so effortlessly. I also made a quick blueprint to flicker one of the lights upstairs to try add some atmosphere to the hall.

Not much more to talk about on my part this week. Going into the final week mine and Becky's areas are on track, we have some assets from Dom in but not all of them and no textures and I haven't seen much from Olivia so we're hoping to get her stuff soon.

Container City. Level design Week 2

This week has been pretty standard one of just modelling and texturing for me after the first day which I spent looking into setting up footstep sounds when the player is walking. Had the play style been in third person then it would have been a breeze but the fact that the first person game code was a floating pair of arms made it more difficult. Still, I found a way around it using a line trace ray as the point of contact to read the type of material the player was on but for some reason the Unreal editor wouldn't let me call the node that would tell the sound when to play into the blueprint so after spending what felt like an eternity trying to get the final piece to work, it was time to drop it and possibly return when more pressing matters where dealt with.

My first focus was getting the panels textured. The models had already been swapped out with the placeholders in engine and we wanted to get there final textures in place so the lighting could really start to be finalised.

As well as that I needed to get any assets unique to the maintenance levels modeled and textured such as the generator and some kind of power switch to hook up to the interactive emergency lighting I have planned for the lower levels.

This week I also got the water shader sorted for the flooded lower levels. I wanted to get a bit of colour into it like the water had been stagnant for a while but in the end the clear water just worked out better.

I got the Blueprint for the locked gate done. This was made using a basic inventory system to check if the player has picked up the key from the office.

The key gave me a fair bit of trouble as it would get picked up just from the player standing close to it which takes away from the exploration side of the level we were going for so preferably, we needed the player to interact with the key to pick it up. I asked a tutor if he had any ideas but he seemed just as confused as I did to why it wasn't working so it seemed like I was just going to have to put up with it, then about 8 PM I'm staring at the Blueprint and spot the very simple change I could make by adding a pressed node before the 'add to inventory' action.

Week 15: Level Design Project

Swiftly back to work now Christmas is done and it's from a dichotomous duo to a new team project. The Container City. This project is working with shipping containers to create a small, modular and playable level in UE4 featuring interactive elements, so doors, locks, pick ups ect. This would be in the style of our choice from either Sci-fi or Dystopia. As much as I love sci-fi I was in favor of dystopia from the word go, rust is a lot easier to make believable than hi-tech I find.

We kicked off the first day attempting some level planning and while we were advised to focus on a layout before thinking about content, without something as a focal point we weren't getting particularly far so we switched to moodboards to help with idea generation.

Of all our collective moodboards the images that caught our attention were greenhouses that had interesting, coloured lighting. This seemed a good starting point for creating some usual scenes and atmospheres and was a large factor in the final selection of our greenhouse level.




After settling on a more solid idea we started to once again arranging a layout for the level and the pathways for the player. Becky, from the ideas discussed threw together some simple plans for what we had in mind with a summary for the player's journey.

We delegated work mostly by rooms, breaking off to each tackle a certain room and tasks to begin with. For my part I choose a feature that I had wanted added when we were suggesting ideas with was a flooded lower levels. I thought some corridors that resembled a sort of maintenance area for the rest of the facility would be a nice contrast with mechanical components and man made lighting to the organic shapes and natural light of the greenhouse upstairs.

Since these maintenance tunnels would be fairly sparse and populated with mostly modular components I also took the job of modelling the panels for the shipping containers that would be used to construct the level itself.  

Straight off the bat I knew I wanted the shipping containers to be almost completely rusted, not only to give an aged feel of having been sat there a long time but also with all the plant life to have remained so healthy the metal would be more exposed than normal to lots of water. I also looked into designing how the containers would have been modified for the environment the level was, such as wooden panels bolted to the floors for offices or for the greenhouse a grated floor to drain away water that might accumulate in there as well as how plant life would effect and interact with the materials they were surrounded by. While I worked on creating these panel pieces Becky set to work on blocking out a white box in Unreal 4 was we could start working out lighting and placements. Following the brief timetable we set up my panels had to be completed by the second week to allow us to continue to work with the lighting in a much more final setting.

By the end of the week I'd been in engine also, starting to try out materials for creating water for the flooded levels and stepping up blueprints in testing files to get doors opening and lights turning on which are simple enough. What I really want to try and get running is a way to add footsteps that change depending on what type of surface the player is walking on. The documentation I've found for it doesn't seem that hard for a 3rd person game but the fact we're working in 1st is complicating things. Other than this I finished the panel modelling ready for next week and have moved onto modeling my share of the assets to populate the level with.