Week 24: Sweeping It Under The Rug

The same problem from last week with Blueprinting has followed me into this week too, I tried again on Monday and nothing had changed. So I am going to be honest, I've dropped it and moved onto more productive stuff, any more time spent on the UI Blueprint will just be wasted now.

I haven't just let the HUD hang in limbo though, that would be bad practice in my opinion, so I have come up with an alternative plan of action if no one else in the group can fix it which is to have tutorial pop ups explaining the controls instead.

Once I realized that the HUD was going no where I started working on the Main Menu design, where I created a quick concept to help get feedback from the group.

The concept was rough but the idea was liked, therefore I spent Tuesday and Wednesday making the menu for real. I had to recreate the original Alice's Adventure Underground book as the reference I had wasn't lit as nicely as I wanted. The creation of the title had to be done at home due to a lack of admin rights when it came to installing fonts when in studio, which was a bit of problem, and I still need to tweak the position of the "Wondering Lands" as it doesn't sit perfectly center.

Thursday morning I modeled the leaf piles I concepted, the ones that morph into a cat as the level progresses. The final model pile sits at 595 tris, the other 3 are below that as there's a lot less going on. It might look odd at the moment but I'm hoping it will look great when I texture it with alphas.

For the remainder of Thursday and Friday I started texturing! Something I have been wanting to do for a while. At the moment I have been tasked with creating the textures for the 3 houses I modeled a while back and as we are going for a hand-crafted kind of world that means I have to hand paint some textures; digital painting isn't my strongest area and neither is colour but I've given it my best. 

The house uses a 512 for the walls, roof and base, with another 512 for the windows and doors which is shared between the other 2 houses. At the moment I have only done the albedo for one house as it took me a while to find the correct style, but next week I should have all 3 PBR'ed up and complete, along with anything else I need to texture before the Easter Break.

Week 23: Blueprint Woes

Despite some wishful thinking, I was on UI duty all week. Ideally I wanted to mix it up with some modelling or texturing but unfortunately not and I was doomed to have my face smushed into blueprints for half the week. I have managed to get 90% of the UI working though, which is good.

Firstly a quick update on the Pause Menu. I mirrored over the bottom section to get an idea on how it would look having something in each corner and I preferred it, so at some point I will be making custom top corners. I also managed to get some animation into the menu, which I'll be exploring when the rest of the UI is more finalized.

My other time at the beginning of the week was designing the HUD element of our game, which is very minimal compared to most games. I'd even say we could get away without even having any HUD elements at all but I thought I should have a go at it. I wanted the HUD to be a reminder of the growth mechanic that will feature in our game, so I mocked up a few concepts and got feedback from the group.

The one thing that was picked up on was the overall size and position of the HUD, which I agreed with was a bit big. Originally my idea was to have the HUD in the bottom left but my initial concept did not look correct there. Using the feedback I made some iteration on my design.

This iteration was liked along with it sitting in the bottom left corner, so the next stage for me was to make this thing look pretty. While I was designing the various elements I began to iterate on the design again as I came to realize that the huge wedge probably wasn't needed and I could do something a lot more delicate with it. Below is the final version of the game HUD.

Staring at blueprints was my week from about mid-Tuesday onwards, trying to get the various UI elements to work how I want them. The Main Menu and Game Level are on 2 separate levels which has made certain aspects slightly easier. I'll upload screenshots of the blueprints I am using but any of them could change as this entire thing is still very much a WIP.

Main Menu

Main Menu Widget 

Game Level

Pause Menu - WIP

Pause Menu Widget

The biggest problem I can't figure out at the moment is that the HUD will follow the player back to the Main Menu screen and won't ever disappear when activated which is a huge problem as we want the HUD to be triggered in the level. I am slowly running out of options for solving this which is a bit of a worry.

I think I'll begin working on the Main Menu design next week as I feel I have exhausted myself out on Blueprinting for now. I never expected UI design to require this much blueprint knowledge so I am almost regretting choosing it as an option, I just wanted to make nice designs.

Week 22: UI

I survived the unwrapathon that I had dug myself into from last week. I only spent a day unwrapping, but it was one long day and I won't be letting the unwraps stack up again. I'm perfectly okay with unwrapping, just not a days worth of it. The rest of the week has had me doing some small amount of modelling and a large amount of UI stuff, which has been going surprisingly well until the last day or so.

I modelled the tree roots that we want poking out of the level, which caused me to play around with splines in 3DS Max and the Path Deform modifier as well. Any other modelling I have done has been me tweaking small things in my previous models and adding collision meshes into certain assets that will help test the level.

As this is my first time creating a UI in a game the earlier portions of my week were filled with experimentation in Unreal's UI designer were I had only really scratched the surface, as I am sure there are an unlimited amount of possibilities with this tool. As I became more comfortable with the editor I turned my focus to the design of the pause menu, the only reason I chose the Pause Menu is because parts of that are actually working at the moment. I did a rough concept before I started on the final design.

I wanted the design to reflect what we were trying to do with the actual game, an almost hand crafted UI with parts looking cut out and stuck together like a diorama. If I can figure out how to animate within the editor then I'll have the various sections fly in as the Pause Menu is loaded to really try and sell the handcrafted style I want.

The entire thing is still a work in progress at the moment and small errors keep popping up, but never the less I'm very pleased with the results so far. I spent about an hour trying to figure one small annoyance on Friday night that I have only just resolved while taking screenshots for this blog post. I wish I knew what I did differently within the last 10 minutes but I am not quite sure. Anyway, here's the hover state example for the buttons which are now working! *cough*

Next week I'll be doing anything that the groups needs me to do, which I imagine will either be texturing or some more modelling. If nothing pops up though I'll be continuing on with the design of the Pause Menu and moving on to the actual HUD of the game.

Week 21: Assets!

This week of the Off The Map project has had me mostly modelling, which is fantastic because I've been able to put off working on the UI blueprints. At the start of the week I did manage to get parts of the UI to work so I havn't been avoiding it completely.

As I mentioned last week the UI blueprints link a lot more into other blueprints than I would have initially thought, so a I am finding it difficult to test out some parts of the UI. I did get the pause, resume and quit functions to work which is a good start. The design is terrible, I know, but at least a part of it is working.

I did work on the main menu too but getting that to load into a new level is beyond my blueprint comprehension at the moment. Once the level is in more of a final state, with the various checkpoints, working on the pause menu should be easier... I hope. During my time with the UI blueprints I did a quick concept for the leaf piles, as I needed a break half way in. 

I thought it would be interesting if the leaf piles slowly resembled the Cheshire cat as Alice went further into the rabbit hole. I didn't spend too much time on the blueprints after this and quickly turned my attention to modelling. I began with the simpler objects that I knew were going to be needed.

As the week progressed I continued modelling assets for the first area. I focused on the assets that I knew we would need or that could be used without much need of changing if a problem popped up. I found that I really quite enjoy modelling the mundane objects, like the cupboards or stack of books, I am just not sure what I enjoy about it yet.

The small town we're having in the center of the level is going to be a mining town, so I created a few props to link in with that, like a mining lantern and a cannery cage, other people in my group have made other props to help show that the town is a mining town. Eventually I moved on to the bigger objects, more specifically the various houses that would populate the town.

A lecturer recommended our group to look at the architect style of Strawberry Hill Gothic as a source of inspiration. When I saw the Strawberry Hill House I knew I had to try and incorporate some of the architectural features of it into our own buildings, so the window and door frames are based off the Strawberry Hill Gothic style and on the above house I added a small drum tower like the Strawberry Hill House.

Next week I have to unwrap all of the above, which is a terrible thing. I should have unwrapped as I modeled, but I made a huge mistake with that thought process. I should probably also mess around with the blueprints a bit more but I am dreading that as much as the unwrapathon, by the end of the week I might be able to finish on something fun by doing some more modelling.

Week 20: Idea Generation

The second week of the Off the Map has been filled with me mostly concepting. I also had a quick look into the UI part of the game and it is far more complicated than I expected but that is all to do with the blueprints behind it. I'll first go into more detail on the concepting section of the week.

A good part of the week has been filled with discussions and idea generation, as the group are still unsure about the direction of the games visual style. We all have ideas and luckily are all in the same range of thinking but without a solid art director things feel like they are still in limbo at the moment; I think someone making a few final decisions would go a long way. What would also really help is if we just began creating a small portion of our level, we could all then see art style and change it as we need.

The idea for the final level, the first area was drawn by me

Our original level plans were far too grand, so reluctantly we've had to scale down our level and we've also dropped the style transition for now but we have made progress in the level layout and the majority of my week has been doing final idea generation for the various areas. At first I made a quick block-out of the first house to speed up the perspective side of the drawing and then I went to town on it inside Photoshop. This image was a sort of proof that the visual style could work in a 3D environment.

Another team member created a rough block-out of the entire level, which I then used to concept the other areas, but just not in as much detail as the above image. As I got more into the creation of the below images I began to enjoy it more and more, to the point where I might have spent a little too long on the last few.

At the very start of the week I also dipped my toe into the world of UIs. The actual creation of the UI seems fairly straight forward with UE4's new UI widget but to actually get it to work seems like an entirely different matter and the blueprints appear to link into further blueprints like a series of unwanted chains. So for now the design of the UI can only be thought about really because there's always a chance that I will never get it to work as my blueprint understanding is really slim; hopefully my group will be able to lend a hand with it.

The next week will be me smashing my head into the UI blueprints, with the occasional quick concept for when I get really bored. Unless of course we start modelling, then I'd obviously prefer to do that instead of blueprints.