Ba1b (ii): End of Unit Evaluation

Overall for this unit I am pleased with my progress. My project went well, and I feel like the mechanics I was able to include are fun, compelling and a good test of my skills in unreal engine, allowing me to learn a lot more than if I had just recycled mechanics from each of my workshop sessions. The project itself has potentially inspired me to pursue my own indie project over the summer.

I definitely made some mistakes with the project however. I feel like despite the forethought I put into ensuring that my project wasn’t too ambitious, it inevitably ended up being so. I think I accurately assessed the scope of my project, but inaccurately assessed how much each point within my scope would entail, and had I been given the chance to do it again I would have set my scope even smaller than I did with this game so that I could have added much more polish to the title. On the other side of the coin though, this project certainly tested my abilities to learn a new tool: unreal engine, and so in some ways was certainly a benefit even if the visuals of my game didn’t come out quite like I would have wanted them to.

The content of my essay is good, and I feel like I made some compelling arguments that provoke some interesting thoughts. However, I am worried that I may have deviated from my question a little too much on my final draft. If my suspicions there are correct, I will endevour to do better on that next time.

Ba1b (ii): Final Week Summary

In the final week, I finished up my game project completely, creating and adding all the final assets to the game now that the mechanics are all in their final versions.

As the above image shows, I encountered a strange lighting bug in the engine that was tricky to resolve. After asking a lecturer for probable causes, I investigated the issue and found that his assumption of UV errors was correct. I solved the problem by redoing the UV’s on my rock models in Maya.

My finished level looks great with assets included, and the sounds I added to the game greatly improve the readability of mechanics such as turrets charging up and firing at the player. It should be noted that these sound files I used were open source files, not of my own creation. I really wanted to create my own, but due to time constraints I couldn’t – in the future were i to do this again I would certainly like to give that a better try as it definitely is where my game falls flat.

I also created all of the game menus and win and loss logic today, using a copy of my game’s promo image as the in-game menu background.

Overall a successful final week, and I feel proud in the project I’ve created. I’ll talk more about what I could have done in my end of unit evaluation.

Ba1b (ii): Week 10 Summary

This week, I finished the majority of my iterations upon my game project.

I started with my shooting mechanics, deciding to add a second floating robot that could look up and down and provide a full 360 degrees of shooting freedom to the player. This meant redesigning some of my encounters slightly, but it also allowed me to make the box placement a little more sensible. In the end, the mechanics this resulted in felt much better to play with and feel like a big improvement overall.

I also updated jump height and movement speed to make them more snappy, and rebalanced turrets to shoot a little later and give players more time to react.

The final improvements I need to make will be replacing my blockout assets, and adding sounds as per my final feedback points. After this, I will need to create my game menus as per my workshop session, and I will be ready for submission!

Ba1b (ii): Week 9 Summary

The results of my playtest are in, and this week I have been making the necessary changes to iterate upon the game.

I started by creating a Trello for my game, outlining all the key points I had completed and placing my top priority iteration targets in to mark off as I go.

My first priority was to address this area of the map, that was almost universally poorly received. Considering my time left to remake and playtest another section of the level, I decided to cut this area from the game as it currently adds very little to my experience other than artificially increasing its length. Instead, the objectives within it have been redistributed throughout the rest of my level.

I’m very happy with the responses I recieved, as they outline a clear set of things that need improving, and I tend to agree with them all. I hope that my iterations upon them will serve to improve the overall user experience enough!

Ba1b (ii): Playtest Responses

After conducting a total of 8 playtests, I collated my survey results to take a look at what needs improving from my initial build of the game. In this post, i’ll talk about the results and what I need to do moving forward.

First up was two questions on the movement of my character, and how it felt. Most scored this area fairly highly, the majority of responses coming at above 7/10 at the very least. A recurring theme in the complaints section was that the movement felt sluggish, so I will certainly be marking that down as an improvement that can be made. While I certainly believe that the jumping ‘feels’ very static and sticky, I think rectifying those would require proper animations that are outside my scope for the time being, so that’ll be lower on my priority list.

The aiming and shooting mechanics were a real failing point of the current build. I anticipated this – but felt the best way to improve it was with some hard feedback straight away.

All of the feedback points boil down to similar things: Restricting fire to a horizontal plane, clunky idle poses causing unpredictable aim, and the lack of an available cross hair all served to make the aiming and shooting unresponsive and clunky. These things are top priority to rectify before my final build.

From this section, it looks like I need to improve the readability of the actions my turrets are taking, alongside creating a much more evident link between a turret and the power box its linked with. The later area of my level needs some work too, as the design of the puzzle seems to have come across far differently to what I had anticipated when creating it. That’s definitely something to learn from when I go back and tweak it.

Interestingly enough, we have a 50/50 split between people who think the turret lock-on time is forgiving enough or not. In this instance, I think I will take into account the fact that some of those who answered ‘yes’ may have been indifferent, while it’s likely all of the ‘no’ answers definitely believed something was wrong. I’ll look into a small tweak in this area to see if there’s an improvement. Overall, my turrets rated lower on the scale than my character, so definitely need some tweaking to bring them up to par.

The placement of my repairable robots and the overall level design as a whole seemed to rate fairly highly in player opinion. I think with adjustments to my character, the turrets and the final puzzle area of the game this feel will improve enough that no further modification to the rest of the level is really needed. Were this a full build of the game, that’s likely what I would look at again once I’d rectified the aforementioned areas.

The majority of players found the game challenging, and none felt unable to progress. These are both good points, and reinforce my thoughts that the level design in and of itself is low-priority for now, reserved for second playtests if I were to get that far.

I got a lot of useful miscellaneous feedback in the comments section, giving me ideas on how to rectify a few of the puzzle/level problems and create some lasting distinctions between enemies and friends. A lot of whats on here are planned features already (sounds, explosion particles, replacing of block-out props) but within there is very valuable feedback.

I asked a broad variety of people about my game, from friends to family members and even some strangers through online forums. Hopefully this gave me a wide enough variety of responses to get some unbiased feedback. By the looks of it, the feedback I received was all reliable and valuable. Were I to hold another playtest, I would definitely like to get a larger sample size – but with limited time to wait for feedback and many friends away for holidays, I’ll have to make do for this one.

Using the feedback I gained, I created a trello for my development page. In it I listed all my completed mechanics, the mechanics I had yet to create, the assets I needed for the final game, and the feedback points I felt most prudent to work on. This will help keep me focused on my final goal, and show me how much work I have left to reach a finished state.

 

Ba1b (ii): Playtest!

Today I finished the blockout of my full level, and tied all my mechanics together for my first playable test build. I created a feedback survey, packaged the game as an executable and sent out a message to as many people as I could to get feedback. The message (and links to the survey and download) are as follows:

Hey guys! I’m currently working on a project for my Year 1 Games Art & Design project at university, and I need your help!

For the past month or so I have been working on a game for submission called ‘Against All Odds.’ The game has you playing as a small floating robot, sent to an area to locate supplies after a failed robot uprising. Along the way, you encounter enemies from the uprising, and fallen friends, with the option of using your collected supplies to help them or keep them for the humans that sent you.

The game is completely work in progress, and wholly unfinished visually, but is in a fully playable state. This is where you come in! I need people to play this early build of the game, and provide feedback on how it feels to play.

Head to this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LHSPD5ycIIVOM16JNC7gMnS6-maTmA3x/view?usp=sharing

To download the build of the game. You’ll recieve a .Zip file that contains an executable for the game – ‘Gameproject.exe’

To control the character, use the WASD keys. Hold the right mouse button to aim, and left mouse button to shoot. Locate power-boxes to disable turrets, and collect glowing orange supply cubes. There is no intro or end point yet!

Don’t forget to head to the link below and complete a short feedback sheet for me when you’ve finished. I’d be incredibly grateful!

https://forms.gle/VN6oFU79cwYUoYjA9

Ba1b (ii): Week 7 Summary

This week’s progress sees the completion of my friendly robot mechanic, and the ability for my turrets to be destroyed by the player. With that, my main core mechanics are almost totally complete and I am that much closer to a full playable build.

Progress is still coming along smoothly and I am happy with how much I am learning about unreal as I go. If I had more time, I would like to devote more time to creating expansive assets and polishing up features, but for this vertical slice I am trying to focus on learning new unreal tools and techniques in the time I have.

For my essay I have started a first draft, and drawn upon various other sources from my work. To add to my comparison between Warcraft and Stanley Parable, I will be challenging Juul’s notion of narrative being a poor fit for video games, as his essay has some compelling points from which to draw.

Ba1b (ii): Friendly Robots

This messy-looking blueprint is the logic behind the friendly robots that the player will be able to find in-game. Though it looks complicated, the above is simply a set of branches and ui widget controllers that dictate the strings of text that display on the screen when near a robot that you can repair. This blueprint didn’t need any iteration as surprisingly it all worked as intended when first setup.

Later on, repairing a robot will add to some global variables used to dictate player score.

This video showcases the blueprint in action!

Ba1b (ii): Destroying Enemies

Today I worked on the method my players will use to destroy the turret enemies placed around the level.

To provide more interesting gameplay than simply ‘see turret – shoot turret’ I instead wanted the player to have to locate a nearby control box for each turret.

I created a quick placeholder blueprint for the control boxes, with a glowing green bar light to clearly display the connected turret is active.

In my turret blueprint, I added a branch to my tick event that checked to see if the turret’s connected box was broken through a boolean variable. If the variable returns false, the turret operates as normal, but if it comes back true then the turret is destroyed too. (In future, there will be more to this effect than just deleting the turret.)

Next came solving how to modify this variable on an instance-by-instance basis, and connect each box to its own single turret.

The blueprint above is what I ended up with. When the box detects a bullet fired by the player, it finds the referenced object its assigned to and sets the box destroyed variable to true. It also modifies the material of the light to a red colour, to indicate the turret is disabled.

The variable containing the object reference is instance-editable from the main editor window. This allows me to place down multiple boxes and turrets and assign them to one another through a simple drop-down menu in the main editor window.

I also thankfully managed to locate the issue with my projectiles phasing through walls. I researched the issue a little and realised that I had simply incorrectly setup my projectile collision boxes and defaults. I remade the projectile to have a single collision sphere as it’s root, and for that sphere to have a custom collision set that blocked everything except overlapping pawns and ignored ‘vehicles’ (an unused type that I assigned to projectiles.)

The above video showcases the fixed projectile collisions, and the turret disabling mechanic in action!

Ba1b (ii): Week 6 Summary

This week I finished up my turret enemies, and began blocking out my initial level in the Unreal Editor.

Overall i’m still happy with my progress. The turret enemies were finished with a quick turnaround and the blockout is going well. I hope to have a playable build of the game available soon utilising both components, allowing me to playtest the game ready for iteration afterwards.

This week I also continued my research for my essay, picking up ‘Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Video Games’ from the NUA library. The book has a lot of interesting resources from various influential sources to pull from and includes an excellent definition of narrative that aligns with my own for my essay work.