The Off the Map project is a competition set up between gamecity.org and the British Library, each year has a different theme and this year it was to celebrate Alice in Wonderland. We had to create a playable level based off the original book, with 3 locations to chose from: Oxford, Underground or Gardens. You could combine areas if you wanted. The British Library provided plenty of reference material to use, most of which can be found here, along with the rest of the details about the competition. The DMU side of the assignment had placed us into groups based off our preferred roles and set a deadline of the 8th of May. We can continue to work on it after this to improve it for the Off the Map deadline.
My group consisted of me, Amber Jamieson, Dan Bullock, Denzil Forde, Freddy Canton and Luke Day.
Once we had received the brief the first thing to do was read the book and gather references from all the other Alice sources. As a group we decided early on to create a side-scroller to keep things slightly simpler and this allowed us to look into other side-scrolling games quite early for reference, as there are plenty out there.
It became clear during the concept stages that our group had a lot of artistic personality as everyone was putting forward their own ideas on what they thought the level should look like. I did this my own way by drawing my ideas out. I was bouncing between the level layout and overall style of the game, with the 2 drawings below showing my first solid ideas
The group really liked the above conceptual piece so I pushed forward with another drawing, showing how the game would look in the hand-crafted style.
Again this was well liked and eventually we all settled for this hand-crafted paper style. Unfortunately my idea of beginning the game in a realistic state was dropped, but looking back this was a good idea as it would have been a struggle to implement it along with the rest of the level. While I did this Freddy was finalizing the level layout, using parts of concepts I did and parts others had done. The image below is the layout.
Up until now everything was going quite well as far as progression and understanding was concerned, but I think it was during the next stage of concepts that communication became lost and the vision for the final level became a bit unclear. I pushed further forward with the concepting, now doing rough concepts of each of the areas to help give the group an idea of what it would look like but I think I didn't take each of them far enough, as a lot was left to viewer which meant everybody interpreted them differently. This was a mistake by me and because of this left the group divided with what direction we should take, and ultimately lead us to stray a bit from the original concept.
In hindsight I should have spent more time on each of these and finally added colour, this way there would have been no conflict of ideas between the group because as it stands now I left these images as they are seen here for other people to work on them. I moved onto creating the UI and various assets.
I kept the asset creation low-poly, with some slight exaggeration on parts of the models to help them be understandable even if they are placed far from the camera. Being a side-scroller meant the camera would never get close to most of the assets, therefore none of them had to be highly detailed. I carried this idea throughout all of the assets I created.
The texturing budget was figured out by Amber and worked well for all the assets, apart from the 3 large houses I made. These objects were quite large and also very prominent in the middle scene, therefore having them on only a 512 made them look quite ugly, especially the few that get close to the camera. Despite seeing this during the many test runs I did of the level I never once mentioned it and I am not entirely sure why, as increasing the size of the textures would have been no hassle what so ever and could have improved the look of that section of the game.
During this project the one thing I have improved a huge amount in is my texturing, more specifically my hand-painted textures. Before this assignment I was really unsure about my ability to hand-paint the textures for anything, mostly relying on photographs and Photoshop but now, after spending the time to practice I am much more confident in my texturing.
In between the modelling and texturing I was also working on the UI elements for the game. At first I was interested in this because of the graphic design potential, I had no idea how much blueprint knowledge was required and I probably wouldn't have gone ahead with it if I knew back then. Luckily though I prevailed and our game has a working main menu, pause menu, end screen and tutorial pop-ups.
I am surprised how well the UI worked out, even if I couldn't figure out how to get things to work how I wanted them, I still managed to come up with a suitable work around, for example I wanted the HUD elements to pop up as you progressed through the level. Due to my poor understanding of blueprints I couldn't figure out how to get this to work correctly so I had to change the idea and ended with tutorial pop-ups. It's also great knowing that any future project I am now apart of I can create a basic, working UI.
I do think with some help the UI could have had a lot more functionality, as blueprinting is something I know I'm not great at and I think this was one our groups weakest points. As our group never had a dedicated engine person doing the blueprinting became a chore and was left to me, Amber and Denzil to try our hardest to get things working. Sadly there wasn't much that could have been done differently about the group set up as this was not chosen by us, but we did do our best with what we were given.
The final weeks of the project for me was spent helping others out with texturing and modelling and also adding props within the engine and generally trying to get the level looking it's best. Looking back now I might have chosen a more traditional approach to the level aesthetics, like using all 3D models to define the environment instead of planes, as in areas they are oddly lit for reasons beyond my understanding. The other option would be to not rely on alphas as much, because with the amount our level had it began to effect our frame rate.
This project has been the longest one we've had to date and also the largest group project and just because of these 2 reasons alone it has been a really interesting experience. Having to stay focused on one end goal for so long while also trying to balance everyone's input into the project is a really difficult task. If you don't stay focused it can be very easy to lose interest in the project and that won't help you or your team and if you don't balance the input of the group, people might have too much sway and make others lose interest. From the work side I have had a really fulfilling time, as I've had the chance to try my hand at UI, something I've wanted to do for a while and also generally practice my modelling and texturing. I also got my hands dirty with blueprints and I can safely say I won't be straying too far into them, they just are not for me.
I already have an action plan for the next few months to make sure I don't fall out of touch when the third year starts. I want to redo my character project, this time using more topology reference and my new found texturing skills. I also want to create a small isometric town in the style of Diablo during the Summer too, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. This should also put my hand-painted textures to the test! While all this is happening I'll be doing the usual drawing, as that is something I've always enjoyed and should be catching up on a few games that I might have missed.
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