Off the map Post Mortem

The Off the Map project has come to an end; in all honesty I’m quite glad it’s over.

The project, as you may have seen from the previous blog posts, entailed us designing and creating a playable game based in the world of Alice in Wonderland. We were originally set to make a side-scroller game for the university hand in but this was soon changed by our tutors, however we decided to stick with it as we thought we could produce something really visually amazing. We were put in to teams of 6 to achieve this task, the team we were put with were a mixed bag. There seemed to be quite a skill gap between some of the members of our team and we were quit unbalanced too, we had 3 character artists and no proper engine person but we tried to make do with what we had.

The project was a 10 week project, plus Easter time if we chose to use it. Which I did, as I really wanted to make this something great. It’s really important to make use of your time efficiently, which I feel I didn’t really achieve; there were definitely weeks where I wasted time on scrapped mechanics or having technical difficulties. The character i produced was also poorly managed time wise, some weeks I’d work solely on it and be motivated with it, others I’d prioritise engine stuff over it. Looking back on it this saddens me a little, I really want to focus on characters and it just felt like the engine work really got in the way of me furthering my character skills. This was down to our team not really having an engine person, whilst I did volunteer to do the engine work for our team it was because I was the only member who really had any experience with it.

The project was a positive experience for me though, from reading this it may not seem this way but I definitely enjoyed the project; well, up to a point but I’ll get to that later. I think during the concepting phase people were quite open to ideas and often came up with compromises if there were two opposing ideas. The overall aesthetic of our level is probably my favourite part of the project it turned out really well in the end and I feel that was down to the fantastic concepts produced by Emily in the beginning and also the great assets created by Christy. I really got to grips with zBrush during this project, it’s something I have been meaning to do for a little while now and this was a great opportunity to do so. I had plenty of input from my peers and picked it up fairly quickly using online tutorials, this is something I will be really working on over summer as it’s essential for all character artists. This long project has made me realise that I need work on my time management skills before my FMP so I am planning to really work on this before my FMP rolls around.

This project ended quite badly for our team, lots of rushing and lots of “That’ll do”s in the end, The concepting stage was fun and seemed to work out and the modelling stage, whilst a little shakey with some members, seemed good, however the level just lacked coherence and didn't really pull together in the end. Communication was the biggest issue, a couple of our team members seemed a little distant to the group and so the style or the way they modelled or textured something didn’t quite fit with our levels aesthetic. Time management is really important, its something I tried to implement with the team but it failed a little, the laid back team lead approach I took with container city really had no place here, it didn’t work out as people got lazy and there were never any deadlines set. I feel that maybe my lack of knowledge with the really technical side of unreal really let our team down, our team lacked an engine person meaning a had to try and keep up with the other tried and tested engine folks so I didn’t end too well. Whilst I have a much larger understanding now of how the engine works I am still not at a suitable level to be the team’s engine person, I will chime in to help but I will never be dedicated to it. I sadly never got to spend an ample amount of time on my character design skills, which for me is the most important thing as I wish to be a character artist.

I’d say the biggest changes we went through had to be the cutting of the canal level, the gimmick we came up with for our level was that the change to 2D sidescroller would happen as you fall down the rabbit hole. We cut this level towards the end of the project as it was incredibly detailed but was visually the weakest level out of all three of them. The concept was lacking meaning I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of layout and positioning of the assets. We made this work however by using the wasted assets to populate the forest scene and it worked really well, it made the forest seem a lot more alive and believable.

If I was to do this project again I probably would have split my tasks between more people, the amount of work individual members of our team were producing was unbalanced; I would especially like to split the engine tasks up again. Setting more frequent deadlines for people in the team would be another (including myself) and also pushing for the work if deadlines aren’t met. I would be a little more organized we had an asset list but I felt like nobody was really updating it other than me, I would also set up naming and asset hand in conventions as people for this project handed there work in, in a plethora of ways.

In conclusion, I’m quite disappointed in the way this project turned out, in the end it really didn’t come together as I had hoped and I feel I really didn’t get out of it what I wanted to. I went into this project with the aiming of creating characters and ended up doing engine work which I decided against doing after the last project. I think the major issue in our group was communication, whilst we gave feedback and acted on it some members weren’t so open to crit and changes and some didn’t really like a particular process and didn’t communicate that to the group.

My action plan for the summer is to focus solely on characters, I may do a little engine work here and there for fun. I’m actually aiming to work in team based projects over the summer, in the hope that I understand the dynamic more. I hope to improve my team skills as a character artist and try to reign in my creative input on the level and focus that on the characters design. The design process I go through is another thing I plan to improve on, as I feel that my designs are all really samey at the moment. zBrush is beyond important as a character artist, so I will do a project or two learning how to start the mesh in the zBrush and re-topologize in max or 3D-coat.

Week 29 - Off the map week 11

Easter is over and everyone on the course other than me seems to have forgotten about off the map, I mean this in the least offensive way possible. Everyone is just preoccupied with doing character resubmissions and essays; along with preparing for presentations. This brings me to the topic of this week’s blog post, my failure of a presentation. Basically I choked towards the start of my presentation which really threw me off for the rest of it in turn making me panic. I couldn’t hate Pechu Kucha any more right now; It is a bizarre way of presenting something. How to make someone who is usually alright with presentations completely mess it up and panic, make them present in Pech Kucha format.

In terms of off the map stuff it really hasn’t been very productive week, pretty much all of our team are essay writing, redoing there character projects or are doing personal portfolio stuff for the deadline that is coming up for the Natural Motion Internship.

I have gotten quite far in to a personal character this week for my portfolio I have designed it too fit in the DOTA 2 universe and have followed their production specification; the mesh is approximately 7k tris and follows the DOTA value system allowing for players to identify them easily at a glance. I have made sure for this project to have a keen focus on zBrush, as an aspiring character artist I have found that it is a skill required on every CV so I need to practice. I just hope I can get this project done in time, I am quite proud of the character so far so I really hope this becomes an interesting piece for my portfolio I will be sure to update next week as to where I am at with it, in the meantime back to my CV.

Week 26 - 28 - Off the map Week 8 - 10

Easter is here and the Off the Map university deadline is drawing close. Plenty on my to do list at the moment. Before everyone went off on their Easter breaks, asked them to dump all of their assets into a folder at university for me to pick up and put in to our game. So I started mostly populating the scene with the props provided in the first week, I took it easy this week as it was the start of the holidays and planned to work a lot once some of my team were back. I also plan on starting a couple personal projects this week; I need to start gathering a portfolio to apply for summer internships.

The second week I focused on the cinematic elements of our game, the transitions between levels, animations for puzzles and camera work. I made a handful of assets too to make some of the cave parts a little more interesting too, mostly candles and books/bookshelves. I was quite inspired to model these little assets by the game Bloodbourne, the detailed environments feel almost tactile as you move through them. I made book piles that fell over as you walked past them and candles to create atmospheric light sources. I then put a lot of time in to the matinees for the end puzzle room; this marks the half-way point for the game so I want it to be quite memorable. The final room blueprint was also in need of doing so I also put that in, you go small, grow bigger, push a bookcase out of the way, go small again but realise you forgot the key and start crying; the room floods with tears and the door burst through pushing you into the forest level. I learnt quite a bit in Unreal this week so whilst there is still lots to do, I feel reassured that I’m still learning important skills.

During the third week, most of my team were back so it was business as usual here at DMU for me. I focussed on the canal level this week; I pretty much rebuilt it from scratch as I thought the second time around it would look a lot better. By the second build, it was looking a lot better; id learnt how to paint multiple textures using the landscape texture brush and also the ins and outs of the landscape sculpt brush. I also got the rabbit hole looking a lot better, looks more stand out in comparison to the other trees.

Id managed to start work on a few personal projects this week too, mostly just the design work and the starts of the base mesh. I have lots of plans to use zBrush in these two projects, zBrush is incredibly important for character artists and I need to know it more.

Week 25 - Off the map Week 7

Week 7 was another slow week, I am not entirely sure much was achieved between the team; just general asset creation was the main focus. I baked and started texturing Alice, I am a little worried about Alice at the moment, I don’t have much input from team mates as it is something I have never really done in labs as it is more of a free time thing at the moment with all this engine stuff. There is still a daunting amount of engine stuff left to do so that is also really hindering me from doing Alice.

We showed our level to Emma again this week, only briefly and we were advised to trim the fat a little more around the forest area. At this point we really streamlined the level and it flowed a lot better and just focussed on the best bits. We also got the rabbit running away from you in engine which was really impressive to see, it meant we could make parts of the cave completely functional. Right now I am just planning for the holidays I have spoken to my team, explained the situation I should hopefully have most of the finished meshes left for me on K drive at this point to get in engine then textures after Easter.

For me over Easter I am really going to get it playing a little more like we intend it to be, with matinees and the camera panning around as you do certain things. Another thing I plan to go to town on is cut scenes and transitioning between each level is quite janky at the moment, as a stretch goal I plan to implement a menu and loading screens.

Week 24 - Off the map Week 6

This week started with showing the current state of the project to Emma our personal tutor, during the presentation she helped us to realise that the levels we were producing were just too big and would need to be drastically cut down. At first we thought that maybe dropping the cave level would be the right choice here, however we felt that the cave had an equal share and offered lots of contrast to the other two very similar areas. We then just decided to get people to play through our levels and decide what bits people found boring. Once we had done this, we cut parts out of the level and tweaked the layout a little so it was fairly seamless. I really feel that this has benefitted us as a lot of the previously seen areas weren’t very interesting we took the small handful of areas we liked and combined them in to one; cutting the level down to a third.

This also made me realise that I would need to really work on the forest level, at this point our cave level was looking quite populated and even contained some finished assets, and they were sparce but still there; whilst the forest was entirely whitebox. I actually used a lot of the canal assets to populate this scene, there would not be too many unique assets for this area so I soon filled the space given to me.

Something else really dawned on me too this week, we were officially half way through the project, and we have LOTS to do. At this point I started to think about our time management and how bad its been, so I created massive to do list with all the assets on it letting us know stage people are at. I am also using a website called producteev to help with my project management. Its proved useful this week but im not sure about its longevity.

Week 23 - Off the map week 5

This week a looked at our levels as a whole and decided to really go to town on the canal level as it looked and felt like the level that was getting the least attention. To do so I got all the assets that Christy had produced for this level and imported them and began to scatter them using the foliage brush. The foliage brush was awkward and just sometimes didn’t work, it gave good results in the end, it was a little dense in the field area so I may have to go back and erase some of it if we get frame rate problems.

Example of Christys Foliage

The main issue I found was the ground texture, the texture I was provided with was a fantastic tillable but we needed a mud texture for it too to really sell it and get it looking realistic. So I asked Christy to work on this. This week was also the great merging of our forest and cave level in to one unreal file. Good god it was a mess, materials and textures all over the place and meshes in every other folder, it took a while to sort through and actually broke a couple textures, most are fixed by now though.

I managed to get the Alice concept down towards the start of this week too, which means by the end of the week I could start modelling and maybe start unwrapping too. This was a load of my back as I was beginning to worry about the characters design as the group hadn’t seen a lot of my design work. The mesh is quite high poly as I was thinking of maybe using Apex cloth in Unreal engine 4.

This for me is a major stretch goal, if we are struggling for time towards the end then this will be the first thing to be cut. I also really hope to actually figure out how on earth hair alphas work in unreal engine 4.

Week 22 - Off the map week 4

This week I planned on really going to town with the Alice mesh however I found some more pressing matters within our level. Having seen where people are at in other groups a started to really block in the basics of our level. I really focused on the visuals and the layered feel of the level, I am mostly focussing on the cave level as the other members of our team are focussing on the other levels. Obviously everyone in the team has lots of input on the decisions we make and we follow the concept given to us, although our concepts are quite vague at the moment so we will really need to work on these to refine them.

I asked Christy to make me some very basic rocks to help create the walls of the cave, it didn’t have to be any detailed but it had to look remotely like a rock. Once I got this from him , I scattered it around the cave to give the illusion of cave walls. I then also started to block out the ambient lighting and also start to think about the caves lighting.

I also implemented one of the puzzles we were planning, a simple tilt puzzle where you had to get some planks in the right order and hit a lever which fills the water and raises a platform allowing you to progress. This puzzle proved awkward in terms of blueprints, to begin with I started by thinking about it to literally so I reassessed and thought about it more in a game sense. I set the basics of the blueprint up with the intention of later covering it with matinees. The puzzles is currently functional and allows you to play through the rest of level from here I will figure out the rest of the mechanics for the level although its getting quite lengthy at this point and I may cut it down in the coming weeks.

Week 21 - Off the Map week 3

This week was focussing on getting a basic whitebox going; I literally built this up out of the basic shapes used in Unreal engine 4. I wanted it to be incredibly basic and just show the basic route to see if it worked, we soon realised that it was quite important to not go in one direction in a sidescroller and if you did you really needed lots of verticality. So I played with the route for a bit, it was quite long and had lots of sections but I soon got rid of some of them and its fairly modular so we could probably cut more if we feel like we need it. I also talked to the other members of my team and set a similar task to a couple of them with the other levels we had talked about.

I also started work on our Alice design, I aim to keep it grounded in late 18^th century clothing designs. I started the same way as my usual character projects, I doodled in my sketchbook, really roughly just to get some ideas out on paper. I then went on to think about finding some reference for the clothing, to do so I went on to pinterest and tried to find clothing of the time period. I also looked at other design work focussing on the same era.

 This week has probably been the slowest of the project so far, we have lots to do but no real art direction at the moment. Over the coming weekend I will try to figure this out, we need to get a move on with this project and a rough impression of our visuals in to the white box. I also need to make some seriously big leaps and bounds with this Alice design,  id like to be modelling very soon so I will focus on this next week.

Week 20 - Off the Map week 2

This week was another week spent really getting to grips with engine jargon, I feel like I am getting there with the blueprints and have put some basic stuff together using online tutorials etc. I have managed to get a simple camera swap working, whilst we dropped the idea quite fast I managed to get it to change to first person and back to sidescroller. We dropped the idea early on as we felt it was a cool concept but would be difficult to execute and to justify. Instead we opted for switching the camera at a specific point and only swapping back at the end of the game. This would be done via cutscene.

At this point a lot of our team had decided what they really wanted to get out of this project, for some bizarre reason our team contains three character artists so we need three characters. I wanted to do Alice for certain; we needed a rabbit and decided to use the caterpillar towards the end. Although we aren’t so certain on how the end is going to pan out at the moment, the plan is to start at the canal, you see the rabbit follow it to the rabbit hole. Fall down said rabbit hole and enter a cave sequence followed by a size shrinking puzzle. This is then followed by a forrest level, which features lots of platforming puzzles ( timing based etc.)

Something else I tried to figure out this week was the implementation of a checkpoint system. You think that this would be a standard thing in unreal engine as its in almost every game. At least it will be a simple blueprint right? WRONG its possibly the most complicated thing ever. Such a lengthy process fo such little reward is almost insulting, even when I got it working; sort of. It wouldn’t work properly as the blueprint I used as reference was out of date. I started thinking about ways around this, would it be easier to approach it a different way? In the end I decided to create each respawn individually, as there is only a handful. To do I created a killvolume that when entered it teleports you back to a designated point in the level.

Week 19 - Off the map week 1

Off the map is here, already, I can't quite believe it. I remember hearing lots about it when I was a first year scrub, I saw the work the now third years produced and seriously questioned if I could ever produce something to such a high standard. Now I'm here though I guess I feel quite a bit more confident especially in regards to teamwork etc.

The off the map project is a yearly competition held by the British library, in conjuncture with game city. This is the first where crytek arent involved which means we aren't actually limited to using cry engine. This was good news and bad, it's good because as a year we have become quite proficient in unreal 4 but it would of been quite nice to try out one of the other major players when it comes to engine. This week definitely started out quite interesting, we were assigned groups based upon who we had worked with in the past and how we worked together. Also for the DMU project hand in we were given the limitation of the level being a 2D side scroller, this was a controversial topic for a lot of people. A lot of people had already started planning there projects previously and some had a lot of problems working with certain members of the their teams in the previous project, many spoke out against this however I was raring to go. The sound of a side scroller sounded a little bizarre at first, i can see it being quite simple in execution but possibly limiting too; as time passed and I realised what we could achieve with a side scroller I got quite attached to it.

After  lots of complaints from various people on the course, the tutors finally caved and allowed you to choose what type of project you would like to do. At this point, as a group, we actually got quite attached to the idea of doing a side scroller. We had plenty of team meetings and started to plan what we wanted to do as a group. As it was the first week we kept it simple.

One of the main team discussions of the week was about the style of the project, do we go stylized or go for something quite realistic. We also actually found that the majority of the group were actually characters artists, which was quite bizarre; maybe a mistake on the tutors behalf? Who knows. Either way it's still a little up in the air at the moment we aren't going out of our way to make a decision yet. One thing is for certain, I'm certain we will aim high for this project, we are in fact aiming to win the project so, morale is high and I'm trying to keep the moment I built during the last project going.

Week 18 - container city final

The container city project has been the most interesting one yet, I have really enjoyed the past few weeks and I feel I have helped create something we can all be proud of. As stated in the few posts prior to this one, The idea behind the project was that in groups, we would produce a level mostly made out of shipping containers.  The project would mostly focus around level design and creating a path for the player, the two themes we were given to choose from were dystopian and sci-fi. For this project I worked with Emily Kelly, Anastasia Wyatt and Thomas Kavanagh; all of which were a dream to work with and i would happily work with any of them again.

For this project the main things I did was the engine side of things which were quite basic, I also designed the shipping container for our level, we went for a sci-fi theme so felt that designing our own container was incredibly important to the success of the level. So I decided to design the container to be very modular, so we could create lots of variation throughout what was essentially the same corridor pieces and structure. To do so I made individual surfaces interchangeable such as walls, ceiling pieces and connectors, this whilst simple in design was not so simple to pull of when modelling. Getting the pieces to slot together properly was incredibly frustrating, especially if you wanted to edit something and then reimport it back in to engine. The other many issue I had to over come was actually the technical side of things, i really underestimated the technical side of things, this being a game art course I wasn't really expecting my peers to pull out as many stops as they did with it. I managed to get a few basics working but required a fair bit of input from my fellow classmates to get the more complicated stuff working, stuff such as the key pick up system and multiple locked doors.

As well as this project went, there were a few hiccups along the way, timing was an issue and some texturing was left to the last minute because of poor planning. Another issue was the ending, we didn't leave quite enough time to polish the finale, meaning it was a little lack lustre and didn't quite match the concepts, to combat this we should have planned more time to polish the whole thing. The main focus in the end was getting the game to be functional, which should of been done sooner so this was completely my fault and will try to avoid this in future.

During the next project, i aim to focus more on my texturing as this has been a project where I really ran out of time to perfect and learn anything. I did however learn a considerable amount about making modular parts for a game level and how you can really push this method to make entire game worlds. I am also really looking forward to spending some time time developing a character during the next project if I get the opportunity, characters are something I have really developed a passion for and I am looking forward to learning some new processes to add to my tool kit. In conclusion this project was a huge success given the time frame, much like any group project it had its issues but i feel we overcame them by prioritising the things we had left.

Week 17 Container city week 3

This week, has been by far the most interesting, I really got to play around with the visuals of our level. To start with I used 3ds to concept using basic shapes, I modelled small cutout sections of possible designs for the hallway of our level. I then realised that I also need to really figure out the lighting in relation to our corridors, to do so I put the simple blockouts in to unreal 4 and also created a few generic rough props like a standing light and a crate etc. I then black the scene out and added some lighting to each scene. As you can see below, I kept the lighting quite dim, I wanted to portray a quite lonely feeling in the corridors; the lack of lighting also added to the claustrophobic feeling of our containers. It is at this point we figured out that it would be quite cool that at some point the lighting would change as you progress through the level and change the mood and reveal more of the environment.

I relayed the work I had done to my team and we soon picked a design, at this point I modelled the container exterior, based upon my team mate Annie's design. I then also properly modelled the interior of the container, this took a little longer than expected as we wanted the container to be fully modular so we designed each panel to be replaceable depending on which part of the level it sat in. Here is a full break down of each part of the container system.

I then went on to put in the level completely, of course there were many props that my team were working on at the time but I will put those in next week when they are textured. For now I'm focussing in lighting and the mechanics, we settled on what to include, we will have a keycard pick up to open a door, a switch to turn the power on which then in turn opens the final room door. The blueprints for these confused me to death but luckily a friend of mine was on hand to help me out.
Whilst I was working on all this my team mates Emily and Tom worked on the individual rooms in the complex I worked with Annie on finalizing the final room, we wanted it to be quite an epic reveal but we are currently running out of time so I will really need to focus and put the hours in to this. Annie also worked on the outside of the structure too and she got that looking great with a basic building and some nice lighting and visual effects. This project is slowly coming to a close and we have quite a bit to do but I think we can pull it off.

Week 16 - Container city week 2

The second week of the project was a busy one, for me this week was full of trying out new things and mostly getting to grips with engine, along side general concepting. I generally avoided 2D concepting as it's really not my strong suit and we don't have much time for this project, so I stuck with using basic shapes in max to concept how the inside of the containers would look. To start with I made a super basic box with a hand full of angles and a connecting piece so we could get it in to engine as fast as possible, it was super important that the blackout was done as soon as possible; it's a very short project and we want to leave as much time as possible for the modelling and general aesthetics. I decided to leave this 3D concepting a little while until later in the week so we could focus more on the layout/gameplay, so I took the basic container I made previously and arranged according to the floor plan we sketched out.

 It soon became apparent that the level lacked all verticality, something we discussed a lot during idea generation. So I played around a little and found I could repeat the shape we previously had again below and create an interesting path down to and back up again. This principle soon became one of the main ideas driving our concepting; the tower shape. The only problem was, at the moment, the really interesting paths took you to the outside of the building which means we would need to fake the outside bit as we really don't have the time to design and model an environment.
To help us with this we looked at some of the example work provided by unreal, to see how they handled the buildings and scenery in the distance; we decided to come back to this once we were more sold on a final concept.

As I went through and planned the route we would take I figured out all the mechanics we would need, some were still up in the air as the route wasn't 100% but for certain we would need a ladder of some sort to get back up and also doors that open as you approach them. So I immediately started to research how to create a ladder using Ue4, this is my first real attempt at engine work so it took some real getting used to; I'm still not very sure on a lot of things but as time goes on I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. As it stands the ladder is functional but is very glitchy, it took many attempts to get it working in the first place so I don't want to touch it again for a while. I'll be sure to come back to it at a later date. For now I'll just work on the other outside section and figuring out what the containers will look like.

Week 15 - Container City week 1

The first week back after Christmas, we were given our first project for the term; the container city project.  The idea behind the project was that in groups, we would produce a level mostly made out of shipping containers.  The project would mostly focus around level design and creating a path for the player, the two themes we were given to choose from were dystopian and scifi. We were allowed to choose who we worked with; i made sure to work with people i had never worked with before to keep the group work fresh. I decided to work with people that i knew, as it was a short project i wanted to be sure i could work well with them.

Before deciding on a theme or doing any type of real design work, as a group we really thought about the journey the player would go through, this was the most important thing for us. We would plan everything around this route. From the get go we seemed pretty sure we wanted some verticality in the level so the various level designs we came up with always had multiple levels that you can revisit.  Once we had a rough plan we then moved on to the aesthetic of the level.

We started by creating moodboards on pinterest of both scifi and dystopian inspirations to help us choose which to go with, as a team we were all initially drawn towards scifi. However after we put some moodboards together and debated as a team we realised we were actually equally drawn to both; so we decided to do dystopian – science fiction.  The next major task was putting together a playable white box, to do so we needed ground plans; so i started sketching them out quite roughly and made sure my team had plenty of input. Once we had achieved this, I began to think about the mechanics we would include; i knew we would need a key system, doors that open when you get close to them and lights that turn on and off.

I happily put myself forward to do the engine stuff, along with Emily. I had some experience with engine and really felt this project would be good to really get in to the more technical side of engine work. I never really used blueprints in engine but i plan to really learn the basics and hopefully leave this project with a better understanding of how to make functioning game mechanics.

I’m quite happy about this project and i feel that as a group we could really creating something epic and visually impressive. We have a really nice mix of people in the group and we seem to cover all bases.