For my 3rd week I have been making researching everything with mood boarding and mind mapping everything, I have been also working on unreal further and gone more in detail into the mechanics.
For my mood boards I have been researching the three different types of environments choices of which i had to choose from Post apocalyptic, Fantasy and Sci-fi. I researched different images and found out about the different things about each of the themes such as Fantasy is usually more bright and cheerful while post apocalyptic is usually more dusty and abandoned. I ended up choosing post-apocalyptic for my game as I like things like that as I like mystery as to how the world ended up in the state that it is and the story behind it. I then had to make a list of key assets for my research, and then do a mood board of some images of what my assets would look like. I did not find this challenging as it was easy enough to do for my project.
For my unreal i found it way more fun doing as I got to do more practical things. what I did was that I had to make a door and to interact with it. I had to basically make the door move when I went near it, I started of by going into 3ds max and start making a simple door for the game, mine contained frame work and added some depth to it which was really easy to do. Once i had that done I exported it into unreal and made a prefab for it so I could make more than one door at a time which would have the same function and look to it. I used the unreal engine to piece together the code to make the door work which it did but once I finished that I had to then make a door which opened when I clicked a button and picked up a key. However during this part I ran into an issue as the door was evidently interacting as the best way I could describe it is that it was having some sort of door seizure as it looked to be trying to open but couldn’t and was not opening. However I asked for some help and found the problem as it turned out it was something in the settings which I forgot to do as I had to change some of the custom settings around for my door. Once that was fixed I could finally pick up the key and open the door and shut it again once I was at a distance from it. Overall I found unreal to be a lot of fun compared to unity as it is easier to use with the code written for me already as I just have to piece them together correctly making it a lot more fun compared to unity as if I miss spelt something it could take me for a while to find the small mistake.
Next week I intend to focus on doing level layouts and assets to understand how a game is fitted together on the planning side of things and possibly make some assets for my environment.
Games Design Course - Harrison Preston 