Week 25: Breakages and Aspirations

An Eventful Ending

The Easter break is finally here and with it we say goodbye to the last major term of this year. After the holidays we are back for another 2 weeks before the hand-in of our last project and then we get to work on own projects while our work is being marked for this year. Actually no, that is not quite true, because we actually found out this week that we will be getting an additional 2 weeks to finish-off our Alice In Wonderland project. Wohoo!

Although we were doing pretty well up to this point and I feel like this project is the first group project that I have done this year where not everything has gone completely wrong, we did have a couple of down moments throughout working on our Off The Map Competition entry. This was usually minor things, which only really seemed pretty major at the time, but were easily solved within a couple of hours. This time, we had a bit more of a major problem though!

Group work is super-awesome! (Well, sometimes.)

I had been working throughout Monday and Tuesday to implement a new mechanic into our level: Level Streaming! This would allow us to load levels faster and easier and also have animated loading screens instead of a frozen image with text. Awesome! However, this was also the first time we used this new system and it meant that we had to get used to switching between levels within the editor and having all the other levels be visible on the screen at the same time. This could get confusing, for example if we were to place an object within the dark world, but forgot to actually switch to that level and still have the normal world set as the active level. Once we would then unload the normal world, the object that we just placed would disappear with it, no matter if it was actually placed inside the normal world or the dark world.

In the end it turned out that this way of working (while it worked great for us) was just bad practice though and we faced a massive problem with our landscape completely breaking and causing the engine to crash everytime we tried to edit it. This was a major problem as Anya took over the engine from me to place a lot of foliage into the level and populate everything and the foliage she painted was bound to the landscape. Replacing the landscape with a new landscape would therefore mean that we would lose all of our foliage and that would've been quite a big impact on our progress. So we tried to solve the issue and I went into contact with an employee at Epic Games (the developers of the unreal engine) who tried to assist me by taking a look at the level. In the end it turned out that the only solution for this problem was to switch directly into the level we were editing, rather than using the level streaming within the editor. It took us a whole day to figure this out, but at least in the end we managed to save our project. Phew!

An engine crash! Oh wait.. wrong engine.

Technical Artist?

Furthermore, we had our formal reviews this week. Funnily enough I was actually looking at internships at different companies on the day before and discovered a position for a Technical Artist Intern at Ubisoft in Newcastle. I had a browse through and pretty much decided that becoming a technical artist would probably best suit me. Combining modelling and texturing with scripting is something that I personally feel like is interesting and it almost seems that it is pretty much what I am doing on this project right now already and what I have done on the project before. When I came into my review I was promptly told by my tutor that a technical artist is what I've been put down for as well. So clearly, this is where I am going, which is great!

I finally feel like I have something to aim for. So far I was always quite unsure of what to do, but it seems like I have found my goal and now I can focus on getting where I want to be. One of the things that stood out to me were the fact that I needed to have good knowledge of scripted language such as Max Script and Python for the internship at Ubisoft, which is something I have yet to look into. I am fairly confident when it comes to scripting, but I have not yet had the patience to sit through and actually learn a particular language. I know bits and bobs when it comes to PHP and back when I was playing a lot of Garry's Mod, I learned scripting from scratch using a made-up language known as "Expression 2" (http://wiki.wiremod.com/wiki/Expression_2) within an addon called "wiremod", so I am fairly confident that it should not be too hard for me to pick up on Max Script or Python. However, for now I will concentrate on getting our current project done.

Easter Holidays!

I am aiming to keep posting on my blog over easter, since I have quite a bit of work to do for out project. Most of the asthetics are done now, but I have yet to create many cutscenes and puzzles. We went over this during the beginning of the week and I have made a nice big list of stuff that I need to do. I am quite confident that I will get everything done though and if not, then I still have 4 weeks to finish it off after Easter and most importantly several months until the final hand-in for the actual competition. So I should be fine.

Stay tuned~

Week 24: Sounds fishy!

When will the blueprints end?!

The short answer: Not yet, and looking at it, probably not that soon either.

Over the past few weeks I have been focussing a lot on blueprints and I am glad to say that I have learned a lot! I am becoming increasingly more confident in scripting using Unreal's blueprint system and on top of that I am fully enjoying it, however there is a slight problem. I am still studying Game ART - and there's a reason for that.

I was originally always more inclined to become a programmer myself. I was naturally very talented in maths and my logical side of the brain is a lot more predominant than my creative side. After I had finished school I was aiming to study maths and computer science, however things went a bit out of hand and I found myself stuck taking a gap year instead, which was followed by another gap year in which I even started working, until I finally decided that I didn't yet want to give up on my aspirations of working within the games industry and had to get back into learning.

The 2 Sides of the Brain (Logic and Creativity)

During my gap years I had tried to learn programming myself, however I quickly lost motivation and it didn't go all too well. The subject was easy enough to learn, yet I just didn't want to go on. So instead I took up a course at college labelled "Games Development", fully knowing that it will most likely be either programming or art, since those seem to be the 2 major components of making video games. When I actually started the course this turned out to be art.

At first I was a bit scared that it might not be the course for me, as I never considered myself to be any good at art, even though throughout all my school history I studied art (mostly because it was compulsory back in Germany and when I finally moved the the UK I decided to choose art as a subject since I was so used to having it within my curriculum.) After I had spent a couple of weeks it quickly became apparent though, that most of the people on the course didn't seem to be the creative type either, so I adjusted. I then also discovered 3D modelling and quickly fell in love with it. Although I never considered myself to be a creative person, I absolutely LOVED creating things. 3D Modelling is quite a bit more technical than drawing and it suited me a lot more than using pen and paper, so it became one of my favourite things to do! I even took part in the very first 3D Speed Modelling Competition endorsed by World Skills UK and won!

So throughout my time at college, I discovered the second side of making video games and I was more inclined than ever to get a job in the industry. I ended college feeling quite comfortable with my 3D skills, however I knew my 2D was still quite lacking, so I ended up applying for DMU, since I had heard that the Game Art Design course at DMU is a lot more 2D oriented at the beginning and I had hoped that this would give me a chance to improve my skills in that area. Safe to say I was more than excited when I had heard that I managed to get accepted onto the course.

Looking back at it now, I definitely got what I asked for in the first year. A lot of drawing and still quite a bit of creating 3D models; And my skills in the 2D area improved drastically. The second year however, the curriculum had changed. The industry was moving forward fast, so the course had to change in order to adapt the changes in the industry. We went from covering the basics of art straight onto content creation and as much as I had liked to have another year of going out and drawing the world, I wasn't too fussed. In the end I knew that what I truly wanted to do in the industry was anything to do with 3D modelling (most likely environments, since I am still not too much into characters) and actually creating my concepts in 3D would help me get better in that area.

With the last project (Container City) and this project (Alice in Wonderland), my focus has changed a lot back into working more technically. Especially using the Unreal Engine 4. Since most people on our course are more creative than technical I sort of felt inclined to take over the scripting side of level creation; (A level is not a level, unless it's interactive!) - And I thoroughly enjoy it as such, due to my history of learning how to script and my more logical brain. However, I have slowly been thinking more and more about the art side and I really need to start taking care of that. So I really want to get back into doing more arty stuff for this project. However, as it seems right now this won't happen too soon, since there is still a lot to be done on the interactiveness of our level and I am working full steam ahead to make sure we get everything into our level that we want to.

So let's get into what I have done this week.

Funky Fishes and (K)omplex Kelp

This week started a bit earlier than Monday, since I had received a message from Anya who had finished rigging and animating her fish models and had them ready to be imported into the engine for me. So I sat down in the evening on the weekend and gave it a quick go, which worked out great and by Monday morning the fishes were all in the engine and had their animations assigned, so that I could begin scripting a simple AI for them.

To do that I took my butterfly blueprint as an inspiration and made minor changes to it to make it seem more like a fish than a butterfly. I am glad to say that I managed to get the blueprint working pretty quickly and the fishes look absolutely adorable! Unfortunately. I haven't got any screenshots available, but if you head over to Anya's blog you can have a look at them.

Furthermore I also took on another little challenge that arose this week. Anya had modelled a string of kelp and rigged it to animate it to move slowly so it looks more lively underwater. As it stands right now, you can't use the foliage tool to paint skeletal meshes in Unreal, which meant that we had to come up with another solution, since placing every piece of kelp by hand seemed a little over the top. To solve this issue we once again resorted to using blueprints.

I knew that it was more than possible to generate random foliage with blueprint, since there was an example of this in the blueprint examples demo in UE4. I also have been becoming a lot more accustomed to using the construction script within blueprints in UE4. This meant that creating this kelp generating blueprint wasn't all too challenging. However, I only managed to get it to work for a square area at first, by using 2 points that mark the start and end of the square that you could place as needed within the world. The hard part was making the kelp generate in a circle around the area.

My first idea to solve that issue was jumping straight into calculating the area of a circle: pi*r^2, however while that gave me the area of the circle, it was the size and not the actual coordinates. This was a lot more complex and after some research I finally got it. This is also when I realised that I did this sort of thing before when I plotted a circle into a graph using maths. The simple solution to this problem was using sine and cosine. Using sin(A)=x and cos(A)=y you can find a single point on the circumference of the circle. 'A' represents the angle (so 0 would be facing straight up and 90 facing to the right, etc.). So for my kelp generator I used a random float between 0 and 360 to find a random point on the circumference and then used a random float between 0 and the radius of the circle to find a random spot within the circle to place the kelp at.

You can find a bit more about this on Mark's blog and also about how we solved some more issues underwater.

Rocky Road ahead?

I still have to create some rocks in the near future. This is one of the only arty things that I got assigned to do for this project and I really want to get into it. I did some practice with zBrush earlier in this project trying to create rocks, however I haven't actually done a rock that I was pleased with yet. Due to a recent lecture from a third year about baking normal maps I think I found a reason why my rocks just didn't look that great, so I am aiming to get some better looking rocks done pretty soon.



Oh and I also did a bit of a personal project. I sat down and tried to script a little Tetris game in Unreal, just using blueprints. The game is still in development, however there is a playable version here: http://goo.gl/7R5aQh Tell me what you think about it in the comments.

Week 23: Like a Butterfly!

Little Problems and Weekly Changes

First of all let me say this: Our level is making an amazing progress!

I ended my last post by saying that I would aim to get the tea party puzzle finished by this week, however I quickly discovered this Monday, that this would not be the case. First of all I encountered a problem: Previously in older versions of the engine you were able to select a group of meshes in the level and convert them all into a single blueprint. I was going to use this to make a blueprint for the tea party table, which I could then play around with to take out some parts and enable the player to find them. However, as of 4.7 this feature has been replaced with something different, so I ultimately wasn't able to do what I planned to do.

I also thought once again about the puzzle in general and wasn't too keen on it anymore, so as a group we will have to think of puzzles a bit more. While we do have a few nice puzzles in the level, as it stands it just seems like we're still lacking gameplay. This will be an important part, as we won't just be judged on how nice the level looks, but also on how much interactivity there is. I hope we get around to this problem soon and find some nice gameplay elements that we could implement.

Additions: The Butterfly!

I did manage to work on something awesome this week though: A butterfly! I already started working on it a bit earlier, however this week I focused on completing it and now I have a fully working butterfly with very basic AI. I am using blueprints in this case to simulate AI, rather than using actual Unreal Engine AI systems. The whole idea is inspired by a butterfly that I found within the blueprints example of UE4. I made the whole thing from scratch however and also included a little addition. I wanted the butterfly to keep a distance from the player, as it would feel more realistic (anyone who tried to catch a butterfly before knows how hard it is to get close enough to a butterfly**) Everything works like a charm. The butterfly finds a random target to fly towards every few seconds and if something is within his range then it will land on it for a few seconds. If you get close to the butterfly it will quickly fly up high into the air and out of the player's reach. The model itself for the butterfly was made by Mark and it looks absolutely stunning!

Next up I am also planning on implementing a bird, which will work the same way. However, for that I would need a fully rigged bird with animations, as it would look weird if I have the wings of the bird flap in the same way as I have for the butterfly.

Additions Part 2: Collectibles

Finally, I have sat down and created a quick blueprint for collectibles. It's a fully dynamic blueprint, in which you can choose a static mesh and it will make it look and work like a collectible. I made the mesh glow slightly and added some sparkling particle effects around it. The object is then rotating slowly and bopping up and down slightly in the air. Looks quite awesome!

Plans for next week:

For the upcoming week I am looking into further thinking about puzzles and trying to implement some more things into our level. I will also probably look back at the maze that we have in our level as we are currently working on changing quite a bit of it. Also if I will find some time I want to try and do some more arty stuff. After all, I am studying Game Art Design :)

Stay tuned~

**- And yes, I have actually tried to catch a butterfly..(during a volunteering session I did as part of my job at McDonald's) and I succeeded:

Week 22: A Quick Week

Progress on the Project

Aaaaand woosh! Another week has passed. I feel like it wrote my last blog post just yesterday. Our level is progressing along nicely and we are slowly filling in the missing gaps with more and more assets. I was focussing on completing the fountain puzzle this week by implementing the checkpoint system. You can now return up onto the middle platform of the fountain once you've reached that point in case you ever fall down, which will make it a lot easier for people to complete the puzzle without getting too frustrated about it.

Another new addition this week was UMG. The Unreal Motion Graphics UI Designer is a great tool within UE4, that can help the user create a working UI without too much hassle. I used it to create text's within our level that notify the player of when he reached the checkpoint. It will also outline the key the player needs to press in order to return to the checkpoint once they fall down. In addition to that I also ported over my old HUD, which I used for switching between the worlds, since it was much less complex this way.

UMG UI Designer

I did encounter one problem while using UMG and that was the fact that, although you could have a tick event within a UMG widget, you couldn't run more than 1 line of nodes at the same time. Sequences didn't work and neither did custom events. In the end I had to resort to creating a single UMG widget for every bit of text that I wanted to appear on screen. Maybe not the best solution, but still a lot less complex than my previous HUD.

Apart from that not much has happened unfortunately. The week went by so fast that I didn't get around to doing a lot of other things. I did mess around with the water a bit and came up with yet another water shader, which I am quite pleased with, however there is a slight problem, since it is practically invisible when viewed from below the surface, meaning that once you enter the water the water surface disappears, leaving you feeling like you're floating or something. So far I have failed to find a work around for that...

Next Week:

Looking ahead I am starting on the next puzzle now, which I will focus on during the next week. Currently we are planning on having a puzzle within the tea party area. This will require the player to set the table by picking up objects and bringing them to the table within a certain time limit. So far I have touched this briefly, by creating a particle effect for fireflies, since our tea party area (within the other dimension) is quite dark and I found that you could barely make out anything on the table. I also have previously worked on creating the possibility for players to pick up physics items and carry them, which will take away a lot of the scripting that I need for this puzzle.

Glowing insects? Awesome!

I will aim to get the puzzle done by the end of the week. Stay tuned~

Oh and yeah, Unreal Engine 4.7 has been released and it's amazing! ( https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-47-released )  We previously had some problems with foliage shading within unreal, but that problem has finally been fixed and the foliage is looking better than ever! Yaaaay!!

Week 21: Puzzle Time!

Progress and Problems

We're making progress! - or so it seems. The level for our Off The Map competition entry is coming along great. We are slowly, but surely populating the scene and I am liking how fast we are getting on with this whole project. However, there is a slight issue. There is something that just seems off.

We have been receiving feedback from a set of tutors that was designed to our group throughout this project and continue to regularly receive feedback twice a week. One thing they pointed out was that our level - while it looks great - just doesn't look like Alice in Wonderland. While we have referenced quite a few parts from the book (like the lake of tears, the tea party and the croquet grounds and palace), the whole thing just doesn't look a lot like Oxford, which is the city that Lewis Carroll lived in when he was writing the book. Since it was his home town, he would've taken a lot of inspiration from it when writing the book and we somehow need to incorporate this in our level.

Our level so far.

Models and EVEN MORE Blueprints!

Aside from that let's see what I have been working on this week. I spent quite some time modelling a tree. I am currently learning how to get better at modelling foliage. I have an awesome tutorial, which teaches how to model foliage from scratch and then use that modelled foliage to bake down diffuse and alpha maps to use as texture for making foliage. I didn't get around to finish it yet though, as I was also working on more blueprint related stuff.

I have implemented a system that switches the character between worlds. We wanted to have a rabbit hole, which would lead the player across the river and into the tea party area, in which everything would be like a different dimension. Instead of the luscious, green grass, we would have a purple sky and a very misty and surreal environment. So to do that we basically created a copy of the level and changed a few parameters to achieve that effect. The blueprint would then load this level and teleport the player to the other side of the river. I had to create a text displaying on the HUD to notify the player that the next level was being loaded and I also had to learn a bit about save games in UE4, which was a bit hard to get my head around at first. Basically, you can not transfer variables between levels. Everytime you load a level, everything from the old level gets deleted and reset. This was a problem, since later on I will work on scripting in a collectible system and I wouldn't want the player to lose all his collectibles when he entered the other level. This is where a save game comes in. It allows you to save a bunch of variables into a special blueprint and then save the whole batch into a file, which can then be loaded again once the new level has been opened.

Tea Party (slightly outdated screenshot)

Another thing I have been working on was a puzzle. We wanted to have a massive fountain right in the centre of our level and decided we could use that to implement a jumping puzzle. I have been working on optimizing this puzzle and it is now working great. It included a set of blocks at the base of the fountain that have a pattern of going up and down in different speeds. The player needs to jump from platform to platform to reach the second stage of the fountain. From there he would then need to jump onto a set of cards, which are flying around the fountain in different directions and speeds. Once the player reaches the top, he will be rewarded with a collectible.

The hard part about making this puzzle was making it achievable for people of all skills. When I created the puzzle at first, I made it challenging - or at least what seemed challenging to myself - but because I was already a seasoned veteran when it comes to PC games it was way too hard for people who don't often play PC games. I had to tweak quite a lot of things, like the controls of the player, which were very sensitive. One person pointed out, that they have problems, since they like to keep their hands touching the keys, however an ever so slight movement would result in an accidental quick button tap, which would launch the player forward. To counter this I implemented a very slight delay (0.05 seconds) into the controls, which is just enough to not make the player launch every time you simply tap the key, but it's not noticeable if you actually intend to move and hold down the key. The controls feel a lot better now.

Another thing that I changed was the collision of the platforms. I noticed that many players who don't often play PC games tend to look straight ahead to the next platform when jumping, instead of looking down at the platform you're jumping from. This would cause them to often jump too early and loose a vital bit of distance and fall down instead of getting to the next platform. By making the collision slightly bigger than the platform itself, it would not take away from the challenge, however make it less punishing if you miss-time your jump. I am thinking of incorporating this into the level in addition to creating a system that will incrementally increase the size of the platforms if the player keeps failing, so that the game would gradually get easier as they keep trying.

I had to tweak the speeds of platforms and distances between platforms quite a lot, as well as change the size of 2 platforms, between which I wanted the player to use the sprint feature that I scripted into the game, however at first it didn't seem obvious and people who tested the game always wanted to jump between these platforms at first without sprinting. I wanted it to be more obvious, so I make the platforms longer in size, so that it looks a bit more like they have enough space, making the player more willing to sprint.

Fountain (with puzzle)

Finally, I have been working on a small script that allows the player to pick up objects within the level. This wasn't too hard, as there was an example of exactly what I wanted within the Example Contents of UE4. While introducing me to a few new nodes within the blueprint editor, I quickly understood what they meant and re-scripted it within our level.

More additions to come.

I plan on implementing a checkpoint system, so that if you reach the second half of the fountain, you wouldn't have to do the whole first part again incase you failed, as people who didn't usually play PC games found it quite frustrating to get half way through only to fail and having to re-do the whole puzzle. More on that next week~

Week 20: Water Shaders and More Blueprints

Water in Unreal Engine 4

This week I continued to work on the Off The Map competition project. As part of our level we wanted to have a lake of tears and for that we needed a water shader, so another member of my team and me set out to have a little competition as to who can create the better water shader. Following a simple tutorial online I managed to create a quite good shader, however it required a lot of tweaking which is what I spent most of this week doing. In the end we got a decent result, however we couldn't get any reflections on the water surface.

A bit of research later we then discovered that UE4 currently doesn't support reflections on translucent materials, so I sat down again and created another water shader and made it opaque. The reflections that we got from that shader looked even better, however we really wanted to stick with the translucent water as well, as this would also give a nice effect once you are actually below the water surface. We tried out having a plane of opaque water on top of the translucent water and while that looked kinda good it just didn't work. In the end we just stuck with using translucent water and ditched the idea of opaque water completely.

Opaque Water

Translucent Water

Blueprint Work

In addition to creating the water shader I was also working on some additional blueprints. In particular a simple jumping puzzle that I am still working on, which involves a massive fountain in the middle of our level. I wanted cards (which for now are just simple blocks) to rotate around the fountain in a particular pattern and have the player jump from card to card. I wasn't quite sure how to achieve this at first, as there is no way of changing the pivot point of meshes in unreal, however I was able to solve this by creating a scene component and then attaching the card mesh to that scene component. Instead of rotating the card I would then rotate the scene component and the card would move with it - Or to keep it short: I worked around it by using a scene component as a make-shift pivot point for each card.

The blueprint was working perfectly. however since the fountain itself hasn't been modelled yet, I wasn't able to complete this puzzle yet. Mostly due to missing collision. I also attempted at creating a simple level switch feature. We currently have a spot in the level where we want the level to completely change from being all green and beautiful to a more purple and ominous atmosphere. I got the level to load using the 'Open Level' feature just fine, however this way the old level gets completely removed, including all saved variables, which would be a problem first of all for setting the player position to what it was when he switched the level (instead of the player start), but most importantly for collectibles, which we plan on putting into the game. The level switch would completely reset all the collectibles, which is something we cannot do.

So instead I tried using the level streaming feature that is built into unreal, thinking I could just stream the level. Which worked... just fine. In fact it even loaded much faster than using the open level node. However, there was a split second gap as the level was loading where the levels were both overlapping, due to me loading the new level and after that unloading the old level. I tried switching around the order, however that way it would unload the level and the player would start falling into the void, before the new level could load fully. So unfortunately this method also didn't work out.

I went back onto using open level instead of streaming and got myself some information on savegames. Unreal has a way of saving variables into a file and then enabling you to read from that file after you've switched the level. This is great, just what I needed! I created a simple function that would save the player location in a save game and then load it back up and teleport the player back to it once the new level was loaded - and I am sure it would work perfectly, however messing around with the level so much has caused it to just constantly crash as it is. I will have a look further into it during the next week. It shouldn't take me too long to fix this issue.

Looking ahead!

We are now at the beginning of the third week. It feels like we have absolutely ages for this project, but the reality is that time is slowly ticking along and we are getting closer and closer to the end. Not just for this project, but the end of the second year. I am not sure whether I am too happy about what I have achieved this year, however I can safely say I got a lot more confident in using zBrush as well as Unreal Engine 4 - and with another 2-3 months ahead of me I am sure I will learn even more. I will probably focus more on building a portfolio during the summer, as I currently don't feel like I have anything that really shows off my skills well enough for me to be happy to use it as part of my portfolio. Speaking of portfolio, I actually got around to creating a model this time. I was asked to produce a bush for our level so I sat down and made one. I am not particularly too fond of it, however my team members have said that it will do. Here is a quick screenshot of it in our level:

Sweet Briar Bush

It's pretty tiny, however we will hopefully use it multiple time in the level and just have it overlapping a couple of time to make it seem a lot bigger.

I am looking forward to the challenges that the next week will bring up. Stay tuned~

Week 19: Alice's Adventures Off the Map!

New Beginnings

Apologies in advance, this might be a bit of a short post, since I am personally not feeling all too well at the moment (mostly, but not limited to, suffering from tight hip flexors, which put me in excruciating pain everytime I move and contributing to a lack of sleep).

We started our new project this week, which is also our very own entry to the 'Off the Map' competition. You can find a lot of information about this competition here: http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map/ Since it is celebrating its 150th anniversary, this years Off the Map competition is based on Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This is a group project, but luckily this time around they decided to assign us groups based on what we think we are best at and I am quite happy with the group that I was put in.

This week mainly consisted in a lot of decision making and personally for me I didn't get to do a lot stuff. I started off by sitting together in my group and discussing possible ideas of what we could create. Our university specific brief was pretty much the same as the original Off the Map brief, with the slight modification of stating that it had to be a playable game and not just a pretty environment. Originally the brief asked for a side-scroller but was changed soon after they announced the project to be more open. In our case we therefore decided to make a first person adventure game. We also came to the conclusion to base our level on the topic 'Gardens'.

I then went onto reading the book. The first step to making a game based on a book is logically to read through it. This covered pretty much most of the first day. I also did some research into games that we could use as inspiration. After that we sat down once more within our group and started discussing our level in more detail. 'How is it going to work?' 'What does the player have to do?' We also thought about a couple of designs and eventually settled on a final design pretty quickly. I then went into creating some basic game mechanics, since for this project I decided that it would be most beneficial for me to stick to engine related work. as well as modelling (These seem to be my strongest points). One of the first things we wanted to have was the ability to shrink and grow the player (just like Alice shrinks and grows throughout the book.) This was quite an easy task to achieve for myself and I managed to draft a quick blueprint for that.

Throughout the rest of the week this continued onwards and I created more useful blueprints. I also started modelling some rocks, which required me to once more dive into zBrush and figure out a way of using that piece of software. I seemed to get the hang of it towards the end, however I wasn't too pleased of the final baked-down results within engine, so I will have to spend a bit more time trying out different things for that at some point in time.

Unfortunately that is it so far. I haven't got any pretty pictures to show, however you can head over to Anya's blog for some great environment concepts, as well as Denise's blog for some amazing character concepts. Also check out my other team-mates: Mark, Sharnleigh and Rebecca. See you next week~