Week 01 – December 23rd – December 29th
Tasks planned:
- Find building assets to help construct my cityscape
This is one of the first asset packs I came across that caught my attention as the models are of various building heights and this will help with breaking up the city making it look a little more realistic however the buildings in this asset pack are quite similar in design which might make the city look quite boring, because of this it wont look like much of a cyberpunk city. overall I do like this asset pack though I think I will keep looking for something that might better fit the aesthetic that I’m looking to create for my game as I would like a little more variation in building structure throughout my game.
This is the second asset pack I came across and it definitely as all the characteristics I want for my cityscape. Firstly it has a large variation of buildings ranging in style and size which will really help me breakup the monogamy of the city looking all the same. Another thing I like about this pack is that its not textured as this leaves me with chance to create my own material for my buildings if I want to. It would be nice if there was a slightly larger range in buildings to choose from when creating my cityscape however what this pack has will be plenty for me to build upon. I think I will be using this asset pack going forward as from the reasons above it has everything that I want for my game.
I think this week went quite well. I’m happy I was able to find an asset pack I liked and will be able to use going forward. I’m not able to get as much work done as I would like as I don’t have the free time at the moment though I plan to make up for it going forward into following weeks.
Week 02 – December 30th – January 5th
Tasks planned:
- find assets to use for my enemy
This robot model is from free 3D and has a free personal use license. it has much of the look I’m looking for in the robots for my game as it has humanoid features which I think make it look more threatening. I really like the blue material around its face as I believe I will be able to change this to perhaps a emissive material with a more evil colour like red that better conveys to the player that it is an enemy. This model doesn’t come with any animations which is somewhat of a draw back and it might look slightly too simple but other than that I think it would work well in my game.
I found this asset on Unreal marketplace and its aesthetic fits the feel of a cyberpunk robot. this model caught my attention due to its futuristic looking design as I thought I would fit straight into my game as an enemy. The model comes fully animated and is free use on UE4. I really like the fact that the model is fully animated as if I wanted to add animation to the enemies in my game I would be able to seamlessly however I don’t like the fact that the model has a weapon as the enemies in my game wont be shooting the player they will be attacking the player much like zombies. Overall I really like this design and I think I will be using it in my final game
Going into next week I want to really get started on the final product of my game as over the last two weeks I haven’t had much time to work on my project other than that I’m happy with my progress on the project.
Week 03 – January 6th – January 12th
Tasks planned:
- Create my final level design
- Create UI to display round count & enemies to spawn etc
- Implement a points system
The first thing I wanted to do this week was design my final level idea as after the problem solving part of my project I had most of the mechanics I needed to have my game be functional. When creating my level I referred back to my research to help me design a city that would look believable whilst also acting as a functional map for my game. My first challenge was how I was going to create the design for my game so what I decided would be the best way to do it was to use the subtractive brush tools to almost carve out the road for my game and this started off working very well and it allowed me to create the roads for my hover car to navigate, however when my vehicle collided with the edge walls the hitboxes would overlap causing the car to get stuck inside the hitbox of the wall. I overcome this issue by having a gap between the road and the curb stopping the overlapping of hitboxes allowing my hover car to navigate the map without any issues. I tested the map design multiple times making small tweaks each time to better optimise the map for my game like changing the width of the roads and adding a pillar to the middle of the map. Lastly to finish the map design I looked into some building models and chose a selection to build the city in my game. I’m really happy with the look and style of my final level design and think I achieved my desired aesthetic.
Also this week I finished the creation of my UI. I added in a counter for the round count as well as how many enemies are left to be spawned, this is important to add so that the player will be able to tell how there doing and roughly how far through the wave they are. This was really easy to setup as all I’m doing is displaying my integers from my blueprints and converting them to strings. This is something I’ve done before in previous games so I didn’t have any trouble with it and was able to move on to other parts of my project.
Lastly this week I created a points system for my game, the points are there to give the player another sense of achievement other than just the increase in rounds. I set it up to give the player score for every shot that hits the enemy as its quite difficult to aim and shoot whilst driving so the player should be rewarded for this. It was very easy to create as all I had to do was add a points integer to the player blueprints and add a number to this value every time the line trace comes back as true. I didnt have any issues setting this up allowing me to finish all my tasks on time this week.
I completed all of my tasks on time this week and didn’t really feel I had any issues this week, I had to solve some issues with the map design but I did this in a timely manner which has left me in a good position going into next week. I don’t think I need to make any changes to my work ethic going forward as I have completed everything on time.
Week 04 – January 13th – January 19th
Tasks planned:
- Increase spawn speed after wave 5
- Setup damage and health pickups
- Insert enemy 3D model and set an animation
One of the things I wanted to change about my spawn system from my problem solving was the rate at which my enemies spawn after a certain round number and this was to increase the pace of the game and make it more challenging for the player. I did this by putting my spawning system on a “event tick” system rather than a “on begin play” system, this allowed me to update my values throughout the course of the game. this did present an issue of the constant updating causing the spawning to bug out. What I did to combat was put this on a do once function so that it will only fire the event when it is true and then close the loop until it is reset by my branch. I like what I have designed here though I think there may be a more efficient way of doing this however what I have here works and does what I need so I am happy with it.
Secondly this week I created the pick-ups for my game. I plan to have these drop on a percent chance from my enemies but for now I just wanted to get their mechanics working. first of all I created a master pick-up and this is a base class that tells my collectibles to destroy themselves after overlapping with the player, this allows me to easily create other collectibles as a child of this blueprint so that I don’t have to recreate them from scratch each time as what is on the master pick-up will be on all of the pick-ups. Now that I had the master pick-up I could focus on creating my health and damage pick-ups and they were very simple to make as all I had to do was access the values I had already set on player script and change them as I wanted after I had got the collectible. I ran into an issue where my damage pick-up was adding health and I discoverer that because I duplicated the health pick-up to create it, it somehow was able to cause the health pick-up to fire. I am very happy with the pick-ups and how they work as they have added another level of depth to my game and have brought my game idea closer to fruition.
The last thing I wanted to achieve this week was to give my enemies a 3D character model and to have it animate a run animation as it comes towards the player, firstly I used an asset that I found earlier on in my project and imported the skeletal mesh into my project, I then selected as the mesh as my enemies mesh. the model I downloaded came with already created animations so all I had to do was set the animation to run when the enemy is spawned into my scene. I’m very happy with the model I chose as I think it fits the aesthetic of my game very well and the animation runs smoothly for chasing my player.
I’m really happy with my position going into next week as I think I’m working on time to complete my project. I didn’t find myself running into any real issues this week which is why I was able to finish everything on time. Going into next week I will try and do much of the same and keep my work up to my current standard whilst still completing all my tasks on time
Week 05 – January 20th – January 26th
Tasks planned:
- Create power-up drop chance
- Create emissive materials
- Add UI images for crosshair
Going into this week I wanted to create a random drop chance system for the power-ups in my game that would be triggered by killing the enemies. So I looked into a system which required me to setup a data table of variables that can be chosen from and if all the criteria’s lined up that item would be allowed to drop. This way of doing it is very complex but has amazing data management which would be ideal if i was working on a much larger project with an increased number of items that could be dropped. The beauty of this system is that all of the data in the table is editable within an excel document allowing for easy balance changes to be made if you needed too. I didn’t need a system this complicated for my game which has two drops but I still looked into it as it might be helpful in future projects and it allowed me to learn tools which I hadn’t used before in UE4 such as Structs, Data tables and Enumerators.
This is how I ended up doing my drop chance for my game and its actually quite simple. I assigned a value to each of the power-ups and then setup a random number generator to chose a number between 0 and 19 meaning that my power-ups have a ten percent drop chance. that number is then checked between two branches which if are true will spawn the relevant power-up. This system works really well and I can easily edit the drop chance by increasing or decreasing the range in the random number generation.
I also created an emissive material for my power-ups making them more evidently something you are meant to pick up. I first had to create an material that had emissive properties and then create a material instance off of that so that I am able to change the colour and how intense the emission is. as its an instance as well I am able to change these values through blueprints if I need to. This didn’t take me very long to setup and I’m quite happy with the results and it will be something I now know how to do in future projects.
Also this week I found an asset pack for crosshairs that I wanted to use in my game to replace the default square I had been using up until now. The crosshair pack contains multiple different varieties of crosshairs along with colour variations. I chose the neon coloured ones as they best fit the theme of cyberpunk. When placing the image into my UI I had to experiment and find the position the crosshair needed to be in so that it was an accurate aiming device for the player. The challenges presented to me for this where the fact that the camera is third person so you wouldn’t be looking exactly down the lens and the fact that the camera has some lag to drag behind the vehicle. I found the right place in the end and I’m pleased with the end result, the added touch of some finished assets really helped bring the UI together.
I think this week went really well for me as I was able to learn a few new tools and how to apply them in UE4 which will help me with future projects. it also showed me good data management practices and how important they are. I was able to complete all my tasks on time which I’m happy so going forward I will try and keep doing what I’m doing.
Week 05 – January 27th – January 31st
Tasks planned:
- Create main menu
- Research pick up assets
- Add assets into the game
Firstly this week I created my main menu for my game and to do this I made a duplication of my level and then removed my player start and changed the gamemode so that it wouldn’t choose a default pawn class which allowed me to setup a camera with a view target blend that looks over my cityscape with a simple menu system that allows the player to quit or play the game. It was quite easy to set this up as I have created a main menu in UE4 before so I just had to apply the skills I had already learnt to create the menu. I think if I had some more time I would Like to create a more aesthetic UI design but other than that I am very happy with functionality of my main menu.
I decided I wanted to find an asset for the health pick-up in my game and this was because I needed it to be visually clear what the two power-ups do in my game. I knew I wanted the health pick-up to be something mechanical like a cog or gear etc rather than a health pack as its the car that’s getting damaged so having pick-ups that highlight the fact its the car being “healed” is ideal. I came across this asset in my research and I liked the simplicity of its design and there after applying my gold emissive texture I created I think it would fit well aesthetically into my game.
This is another asset I happened upon in my research and I really liked the solidity of this design and the fact that the model already had normal maps giving the object that added extra level of depth and detail. I think this would also look good in my game once I apply my material to it however I don’t want the pick-up to have too much detail as it wont be on screen for much time at all and with the speed the game is played at the extra detail would be unnoticed. considering this I think I will choose to not use this design and go with the first model I found in my research
Here you can see my collectibles implemented into my game with there emissive materials. I really like how they fit into my game. in the third picture the power-up on the right is the damage drop and I have taken the piece from the top of the car where you shoot from to represent this and then on the left is the gear. I think I could maybe tweak the material added to them to make it slightly brighter but other than that I am very happy with how they look in my game
This week went very well for me. I have been able to finish all the last few tasks I had planned for myself and still have plenty of time to finish writing up my evaluation. This brings my project to an end to which I am happy with my end product.
Level3GamesDevelopmentYear2LukeWadey 