I’ll be using this as a diary to record what I do for this assignment.
I’ve not done anything since the start of this project, because I’ve been finding it hard to motivate myself from home since the coronavirus lockdown has happened in London, but I’m going to start trying now.
On the day we decided that we were going to go with my pre-existing game idea, one of our 3 group members wasn’t there, but I’m sure he’ll be fine with the idea.
So, coincidentally I had already done quite a lot of this assignment in my own time before we had even started this project, as I’ve been developing an idea for a game I want to make. I’ve done character designs, made a run cycle animation, made a tileset, and have started making a level out of it in Unreal Engine 4. So I guess I’ll talk you through what I’ve done.
One night as I was lying in bed I had an idea for a 2D pixel side scroller game where a sister and her younger brother find themselves in and explore a strange land, braving puzzles and weird characters, only to find out at the end that they are living in the mind of a murderer on trial in a dystopian future where innocent A.I children are inserted into the minds of those on trials and are the final deciding factor on whether they deserve the death penalty or not. By doing this the A.I see all of the factors that led these people to become who they are, like childhood, money problems, family problems, bullying etc.
I included some of my idea development and character design sketches in my university portfolio, so here they are.
My first ideas.
An idea for a landscape.
Trying to develop an artstyle and characters. Drew one lil guy with a scarf and coat, and liked it, so continued developing that design.
More ideas around that scarfed dude. Realised by now that I want this character to be a young girl.
Starting to develop ideas for a younger brother character.
Further ideas for the two characters, and their height differences.
Around Christmas, I drew the character designs on squared paper to see what they would look like in pixel art (Left). I also decided on the colours I wanted them to wear.
I then used an app called Pixel Studio on my phone to make these designs in a more polished, digital form (Right).
I also came up with a name for what I wanted to call my games studio if I ever got that far. “Little Dark Studios”, because my name means little dark one.
I then made a collage of photos I found online to develop my idea for the landscape that I showed my sketch of above.
I then followed a tutorial on how to make a tileset on Photoshop.
I used the template he gave out to make my own. I wanted to make a rocky, mountain path. I also wanted the scene to be purple-tinted, possibly inspired by Undertale tilesets. I worked hard on these to try to make them seamless, so it is unclear where one tile starts and another ends.
I then spent many an hour trying to figure how how to make these into a slope. These are the finished tiles. Sorry about the blurriness of them, they’re very small images.
I then followed a tutorial on how to make a pixel art run cycle.
At the end of it, I modified the character he’d shown me how to make a run cycle with and made it into the sister character from my game idea.
Seeing as almost all of the universities that I’ve applied for primarily use unreal engine 4, I figured it would be best to use this to make a level from my game, as opposed to Unity which requires me to learn basic coding, and Gamemaker Studio 2 which, although easy to learn, it costs money.
I followed this tutorial teaching me how to make a 2D sidescroller in UE4. It was extremely interesting to see how an industry level 2D sidescroller game is put together.
I got to the point where I could build levels out of my tileset in UE4, but I couldn’t make my character move. And also when I run my game, the default character model appears and falls to his death. This is where I am at currently. Here is a screenshot from UE4.
So in the last class that we had before the coronavirus sent London into a lockdown, me and my other teammate Jessi made a mood board of inspiration for the art and story from other similar games.
We also made a mindmap of ideas for the story.
I watched this video for research for a different project, but near the end, it talks about a concept called “The Psychological Landscape” which is a physical land that represents the inner psyche of a character, just like my idea for my game.
Oh, and kind of unrelated, here are our ideas for an in-class task we did the week before college closed down, where we had to classify characters from two games’ into Todorov’s narrative theory character types. We also had to come up with an idea for a game set in any time period, where a big disaster takes place.
Here’s Todorov’s theory if you’re interested.
So, using the sister design and run cycle as a reference, I made the younger brother character into a better design, then animated him running. Look at him go!
I then made a turnaround animation of him. I decided to show him from 8 different angles, each a roughly 40-degree increase on the last one. It was hard to imagine how he would look from each angle in a somewhat 3D space, but I’m pretty happy with the result. I feel kind of sorry for the poor little infinitely spinning guy.
I then did the same with the sister character.
This isn’t really relevant, but I just wanna put this here because it’s a really interesting and funny talk from one of the creators of Dream Daddy.
Okay so although It’s probably super easy, I can’t really be bothered to learn how to make the game level in Unreal engine 4 paper 2d. I’ve given it a fair shot, but I find it confusing and fustrating. So I’ve started a month free trial on gamemaker studio 2 which I’ve used before and it’s a hell of a lot easier to learn. This game engine was also designed for pixel games originally, unlike UE4. So I’m going to be making the game level in that. For ease of learning, I’m going to use the DnD or Drag and Drop programming thingy instead of coding, for ease of learning.
I’m going to be following these videos to make the level.
Ciaran :3 