Weekly Summary: 3

14:29 BA2a , Interactivity , UE4 0 Comments

I began the week teaching myself some further, fundamental UE4. I followed more of a tutorial. creating a sliding door through blueprints that works via hitbox.


Going back in time a tad, I also learned the fundamentals of creating a 3D platformer, with explosions because education.



Back to this week, we also learned how to create jump pads and changing their trajectory, creating a pistol that fires bullets and collectibles that disappear when you touch them, in this case ammo but it could be used for many things in a 3D game.


However despite learning about 3D, im choosing to make a 2D platformer. Many of these nodes and blueprints could be applied to a 2D game.

I've decided to push my sun and moon idea, to create a platformer based on opposites that will affect all aspects of the game. There'll be two versions of the same world, two ways of movement and aesthetics to reflect this, alongside two ways of finishing the game. It'll be heavily metaphoric and interaction with NPCs will play a big part in the user experience. Taking a lot of inspiration from the way Middens felt to play, I want my play aesthetics to be abnegation, exploration and challenge. Abnegation and challenge may oppose, but that's intentional.

I got to work on mood boards discussing:

Overall theme and mood- an atmospheric world, what is joy and what is sorrow, something I felt was that figures carry sorrow really well, but to truly demonstrate joy, something more abstract, consuming and large scale like light or an environment works best.


Main Character- Im looking into wanderers, Snuffkin from the Moomins came as a key point of reference, harlequins and the Tarot Fool came to mind as well.


The Sun and Moon characters- are taking more of a back seat as characters in my head now, however I still want them present and very different.


And movement, shadow puppet aesthetic and various items to perhaps be usable in game.




I also sketched and fleshed out a basic plan for my level, the geography, though this is a first draft. I looked into game map layouts from older games as a starting point.






Red Xs are NPCs, purple triangles and orange squares are enemies, the white dot is the player, the green X is a way out of the game and the blue treble clef is an item.

Whilst designing the level, I had the idea of using the chakra points on the body as reference for the map.


Having a different challenge at different levels of the map, on the theme of each point, is the gist of what I'm thinking. Survival would put you in a life or death situation or Communication would have you talking to many people. Im thinking about making the game quite autobiographical, the chakra points leading psychological themes.

I also went over a few doodles to flesh out some preliminary ideas.







 I intend to have the basis of a working prototype next week, working on nodes and how exactly I can get the two world concept working in game. I also originally had the idea of basing my game in a tower, which I blocked out in Maya to paint over...


However I've left this idea of basing it around the tower, sun, moon, star cycle in the tarot to expand and push it beyond that, now thinking about basing it more around the human psyche, but we'll see where  the project leads in coming weeks...