Tom's game design

I've recently been thinking about certain things in my project that make me proud to call it my own. Here is a video of the things that I'm most proud of in my project.

My original aims for this project was far different from the final outcome. I was planning on working on the aesthetics and environment of the game as well as the sound and audio aspect of the project but, as I started to work on the models and audio I realised that I was really poor at it and my strengths are in programming. For my research I did a few things, I read a few books, watched a few films and played through some games. But the thing that I felt myself thinking about the most was "how can I add uncertainty into my game?" and this was because of the book called "Uncertainty in games" (You can read about it in my blog about it here ). It made me consider how the player would think about navigating the environment. (Image shows the player contemplating whether or not they can make the jump.) I'm quite proud of what I've actually achieved in this project, and that's partly due to my realisation that I can't make a fully-functioning ga

Today my plan is to make an environment for the player to climb in and explore, it's not going to be massive but hopefully, it displays what my climbing system can do. I will be doing this in a grey box because as I discovered today, soul city model pack isn't in the version of unreal that I am in. So I began with where I started a while ago now. Unforcenetly the footage of me making the environment got corrupted and I can't get it back. I will record what I still have to do but here is a screenshot of what I have done. Here is a video of me adding to it: I'm very happy with the result and I showed a few of my peers and they gave me some feedback, for example, someone said that they " really liked the foreground stuff and that you should add on it". Due to this positive feedback, I added more foreground objects to help make the player blend into the environment. 

Today my plan is to add sounds and maybe particles to my animations to make the player feel more grounded in the game world. I started by getting the sounds that I need from a website called Freesound, they provide long clips of foley sound that are downloadable as a wave file. I then took the file into Audition and clipped it into different sound files as you can see here. I then imported the files into the unreal engine and added them into a "sound cue". I did it this way instead of just using the sounds is so that I could add a modulator and a randomator so the sounds were never the same. This adds some variation to my game. Here is the video of me adding it into my project. I'm very happy with the final result and I will be adding more sound to my game. Looking back at the process now, it's a very easy and effective way to make the player feel grounded in the world and I'm really happy with the results. Here is the finished thing.  

Since this is the last week of the project I would usually dedicate this time to bug fixing but, I've fixed most of the bugs that I have found from the demo days and what I found from playtesting in as I found them. but there are a few things that I wish to do before this project finishes. I would like to make some levels for the player to actually play and run through. I am most likely to just grey box a level as that is the fastest and easiest way to it is but, I might use the soul city mesh and material pack on the marketplace for unreal. Here is the link to it . I Would use this instead of making my own meshes and materials because I don't have the time nor the know how to make my own models. I also want to add some sound the to animations, this is easy enough to do, you just add a sound notify on the animation. I would also get the sounds from somewhere online as I don't have enough time to record them myself. I would also like to smoothen out the grabbing animat

In the past few days, I have been trying to get certain animations to work with unreal's default mesh and skeleton. I have spent hours trying to get these animations from other sites as well as mixamo and no have been successful. This has lead me to come to the conclusion that I will never be able to get them to work with my current tools and limited experience. I have also considered other methods of getting these animations to work, such as changing the mesh and skeleton but this would require me to redo all of the animation blueprints as unreal doesn't let you change the skeleton or mesh on theirs.  After considering all the time ive spent on it so far and how long it will take to change everything, I think I'm just going to leave it out of my game. I can not see myself completing it before the deadline. I have other things that I need to add such as sound and a full level for the player to play through. I wish I had more time but to pretend that i have more time

Today I began work on the roll after the long jump. This, of course, wasn't as easy as it seemed. I began how I normally would, by getting my assets and working making sure they will work before I start coding. So I uploaded the unreal preset character to Mixamo and downloaded the character and this is what happened when I imported it to unreal. When I imported it came up with the message log and I thought, well it must be something to do with unreal and not the animation itself. I asked a few of my peers what the problem may be and they said that " it's one of the most common problems for unreal, just look it up there should be a fix for it." So I went for the unreal form pages and found that the skeleton for the unreal character isn't compatible with Mixamo animations. After that, I continued to try and get the animation with a character mesh that Mixamo provide and convert it to the unreal character. Here is a video of me doing the process.

After the half term, I opened my project and took almost everything I did before in the player blueprint and left the animation blueprint as it was and here what I did. I'm not actually sure what I did differently to make it work, but I'm just happy it did.

During the half term, I had the idea of adding some new things to the climbing system. So I began to think, what type of features of modern games with climbing in them have. Well if you fall a large distance there is a different animation that plays and it often ends with a roll, maybe some variations in the ledge climbing animations and maybe a slide. So my plan for today is to add and troubleshoot a long falling and a rolling animation for my climbing system. Well, I like the idea of a different animation playing if the player falls further so we will start with that.  As you can see I have played around with some was to do this but I've been having trouble with getting the play blueprint and the animation blueprint to communicate to each other, making it so I cant change the animation. Today I came on and continued to troubleshoot for a while. Around 7 mins into the prosses I had a semi-working system but then I messed it by confusing myself. This lead me to anoth