Games Project : Design & Planning Week 8/9

For the next few weeks we will all be focussing on one primary objective. Now that we have finalised most of the details on our game we will be working on building and completing our prototype and bringing together all of our documentation which will include the concepts of our game, the technical details and design, concept art and minutes from each week along with our on going team blog and our critical appraisals. This post will contain updates of our work including screenshots of the prototype as it progresses and then in week 12 we will include screenshots of the final product.

The initial steps of creating the prototype involved learning how to navigate and use Unreal Engine 4 which was no easy task. We needed to demonstrate proficiency in the software in order to create the prototype and, later on, the full game. This journey was made easier as Unreal supply basic set-ups for different genres of games.

As shown above there are many options for developers to choose from but obviously we picked for the basic side scroller. This gave us a very simple movement system that had been programmed for us and a small level to navigate. After spending time looking into the layout and design of the software we looked online for tutorials and tips on how to develop our prototype. Luckily there was an official Unreal YouTube channel which provided to be a great source of information as there were plenty of videos that guided us through the first steps of Unreal Engine. I highly advise checking it out if you are learning Unreal Engine. 

Our week ended with our team leader reinforcing that these next few weeks would be spent mainly on just documentation and prototype creation.

This week began with myself and the other team member working on UE4 discussing different methods and animation techniques for our prototype. We had both looked into various tutorials to try and gain a solid understanding of how the movement system worked as we wanted to learn how to make a character run and walk on our own so that for future projects that knowledge would be already at hand.

The above image is the basic layout of  the character mesh which allows the user to add materials onto the mesh to create a different aesthetic appearance however the key part of that image is the animation tab at the top right which we used to bring together our running and jumping animations and, later on, our punching animation. The animating section of Unreal allows the user to view the animation from all angles which allowed us to watch for any discrepancies in the animation.

After some trial and error the running animation was smooth and worked perfectly. With that out of the way we focussed on level creation as our character's movement had been completed. We decided to leave level creation till after we had managed to get the movement perfect as we felt that would be the most challenging part of learning Unreal Engine.