Project 4

Throughout my experience of Project 4, I have learnt a significant amounts of information about game creation. That being through learning new skills, understanding fundamentals and researching to gain ideas on the process. To begin, the process of finding an idea for my game; I began playing escape rooms or watching people play escape room type games. 3 that I had taken heavy inspiration from would be “FeedVid Live”, “Escape_” and “The Man From The Window”. The ideas taken from these games would be firstly, the idea of using a chat box to solve the puzzles and progress the game only utilizing your keyboard and your intuition of “What would I do in this situation?” rather than following a guideline of confusing puzzles back to back as most escape rooms are set out to be like. (FeedVid Live). Following this, there was an additional impact of using your keyboard to complete puzzles as well as your own smarts; given you were told the method of which you need to solve the puzzle. This being by solving algorithms and decoding hashes and understanding how through picking up notes within the play space (Escape_). Lastly, the idea of depicting clues and using these clues to achieve survival and “escape” a game over. These clues being through reading clues that essentially tell you what you must not do in order to win the game. Additionally, there are other methods of increasing your chances at surviving which are essential; aside from realising what you must not do. Basically giving the game two aspects, where you can’t have one without the other. The game also allows to be replayed due to the circumstances changing with each playthrough allowing its playability to increase (The Man From The Window).

 

Following my research, I began to develop my game. This firstly through creating concept art, as I’m not the greatest at artwork; I had a few attempts at creating depictions of characters to no avail and so had instead dedicated myself to creating a map of the layout of the house. With this I planned on implementing it into the game to assist the player with finding items that may be useful to escaping. Although artwork isn’t a good feat for me, I hope to improve on this sometime in future. Continuing, I’d then taken to creating a Trello which can help me display my work for my portfolio, identify the progress made throughout this project, and allow me to keep track of what is done and what isn’t.

 

Firstly, within the creation of the Trello; making the models within Maya. Each model was rather simple to make at face value, having not imported any models into UE before; I hadn’t thought through the process entirely. It didn’t get until I had to make the desk model that I had realised where there was more to this than anticipated. My mistake was that, I tend to extrude and creating edge loops in my models to create the final model. The reason behind why I model this way is for to reduce the chances of lag within the gameplay and easier to keep track of when modelling; however what I did not expect was the moving aspects of the model. Realising that in order to have individually moving aspects of a model, I discovered you need these parts to be an individual mesh within the model. For example a desk drawer must be its own mesh; fitted within the entire model in order for it to act as a drawer in UE. Due to this, I took to finding free models to replace the ones that may include this; mainly the desk model.

 

Next, I began creating my games mechanics with little to no knowledge of UE and how its coding works. Through this experience however, it gave me a fundamental knowledge of the graphing network, how each node fits into another and the options you have with variables so essentially the whole of blueprinting in UE. But with this came quite a few bugs and issues that I had to deal with. One of the most complicated ones would be the fact that my UE project had become somewhat corrupt after attempting to work on it at home and uploading it to the wrong version of UE. This caused some of my blueprinting to break and one of which being the first person character blueprint that was essential to even get the player into the game. Due to this, I had to follow a tutorial myself to make a makeshift of the original before linking them back into the other blueprints that used the deleted blueprint. Additionally having issues with creating the door mechanics for its opening animation due to me using an older version of UE meaning I had to use different nodes to achieve the same result. Although I did figure this out eventually, I decided to start my project again on a new version of UE as it did not seem optimal to do this for the entire escape game. Mainly however, mechanics such as doors that require keys or pins; notes that can be picked up and displayed on your screen and items such as flashlights were made to improve the game. Additionally, a main menu screen was created, This was a rather straight forward process as we have had experience in creating main menus in the past. Essentially replicating this process meant making a main menu for the escape room instead this time. As mentioned, having made this before, it was not difficult but rather helpful reminder as to how to do so.

 

Lastly, came the importing of all my models and building the map. This process proved to be a bit more lengthy than anticipated as I had bugs with not being able to place my character within the play space or the rooms of my map simply being larger than needed leading me to rearranging the structure of the house. Despite this however, I have managed to make a suitable map that resembles a simple flat for the player to traverse through and escape from. Importing my models, included importing free models to give the house the aesthetic of which a house should have. This was with the idea that it’d help with immersion but also the fact that there are a lot of places to look which could effectively make the game harder. However, despite everything I had initially planned on completing and the ideas I wished to implement; I did not have as much knowledge to execute them which is something I will aim toward working on in both skills wise and time management.

 

To conclude, Project 4 has been a very helpful insight into the research and production of games as a hands on approach which I aim to cultivate and improve on given the opportunity or within my own time.