1. Overview
This first three weeks are the very first sprint of capstone. During the time, I worked on GDD, TDD and some art works for capstone. I mainly worked on most art parts and system programming for GDD and dialogue system for TDD. We had some issues and problems so far but thanks to cooperation and discussions, we could get over with them. I learned a lot through all the problems and the way we solved them. For individual, I worked on Rat rigging and animations, Gargoyle modeling, rigging and animations. I will tell more details below.
2. Game Idea & GDD
In the last semester, James assigned our team and we discussed about the game ideas together. First we grabbed 'horror platformer' and our game designer members thought about the actual game ideas. After we got two ideas because they got same score by the poll, we went to 'Snowed In' and met our mentors. They were really kind and gave us many feedback. We decided to go with "Redemption" and it was Ryan idea. It was basically stealth game and it was not horror and platformer. So the first week, we had to discuss a lot to change the idea. In result, we threw away the 'platformer' idea and decided to go with only 'horror' and 'stealth.'
After all of the discussions, we kept trying to improve our ideas. Few days ago, I introduced my teammates some ideas to improve our game idea. First, I suggested them making various rat movement animations such as walking with only 2 legs when patrol and running with 4 legs when chasing.
Second, I asked them how about this post process effect for our game. It is quite important to hide objects far from the player and we were concerned about it. But I found a very nice one. This post process hides objects over a certain distance in shadow.
The last one is changing perspectives.
When the player wants to look around to see where enemies and puzzles are, the player needs to change to third person perspective. And if he needs to run away or move, he needs to change to first person perspective. With this we can give them more tension. For the first person one, I suggested them using this effects below.
I will put the effects above after TDD for level design.
Anyway it took a long time to start GDD than other teams because of confusions about our idea. We assigned our parts in January 12th, and worked on it until the due. I was in charge of all art parts except UI design and system programming of gameplay section. After we finished, we received some feedback from our mentors. I kept editing GDD after submission.
3. TDD
After some discussions and little bit of changes, I mainly worked on dialogue system for TDD. For dialogue system, I had to learn how to make dialogue system in Unreal Engine 5 with YouTube tutorials. There were some problems about it. First, most tutorials were created when Unreal Engine was using the previous input system. So I had to learn and change it with the new input system. I already tried it before when I was learning Unreal Engine 5 C++ scripting, and it made me so irritated. Second, it was hard to connect character class to UserWidget to print dialogues on the screen. I already had a hard time before to make a pure C++ script of UserWidget class, so I'm quite nervous to do it. Moreover, I've never learned how to create a UML diagram before. I learned flowchart back in Korea, but UML diagram was really new for me. So I had to ask a lot of questions to Marcelo.
4. Art works
About the art side, we had some changes. Before when we were planning our game, we decided to have three kinds of enemies: undead rats, zombies, and crows. I successfully created a undead rat model with 3DS MAX, ZBrush and Substance Painter even before the fourth semester started. Zombie is just a humanoid character so it is not hard to make it, I guess.
But I was really concerned about a crow. I've never tried and never made something with wings. I already knew it would be so hard and it was actually hard.
As you can see, it was really awful. So I had to ask our teammates to change our plan. We had three options.
Buying a crow 3D model with rigging & animations
Changing it to another flying animal such as a bat
Changing AI patterns and animals like a spider crawling on the wall
For the second option, bat also has a wing so it would be hard as much as a bird. So I was negative about the option. For the last one, Marcelo opposed to it because if we add another crawling enemy, the AI patterns will be all the same. So we found another solution. It was making a gargoyle! Gargoyle is also flying and it has a very different concept with others. It is sitting on the pillar and flying towards to the player when he notices the player. But I was really worried about it. Because I didn't know what gargoyle is, to be honest and gargoyle also has wings! I hate wings.
Because of my worries, Nandish found a free asset which has already rigged and has a short animation. But I was so disappointed when I opened the file. The asset was so old, and it was created in 2011 with 3DS MAX 2011 version. The animation was broken and the model itself was so simple and too low polygons. But we had to write about it in GDD, I had to decide whether trying to make a gargoyle model myself or not. If I would fail, we would have to change the plan.
And I succeeded it! Making body was easy. I made some muscles and a gross face using references. The problem was to make wings. It was hard to make them in ZBrush. So I had to make wings in 3DS MAX and then export it to ZBrush. After I finished modeling, I made UV and did mapping. Everything took only 2 days, 8-10 hours. (January 13-14)
When I was so happy to make this model, I realized one thing: I have to do all the riggings and animations. When I was learning rigging and animations a little bit because of one of my project, I learned myself. I'm bad at rigging and animations. For gargoyle, I tried to use Mixamo for rigging at least, but it didn't work because of wings. I had no choice, so I tried.
And it failed at some points. First, I was clumsy and couldn’t do it properly. Biped was so hard and I had a hard time to make animations with biped. Moreover I couldn't export the animation file to Unreal Engine 5. I could export it after I learned it from my Korean graphic teacher. He actually helped me a lot to do rigging and animations. Especially he almost did himself this flying animation.
After I learned from him, I started to do rigging for a rat. Rat is not humanoid so I had to make all the bones myself instead of using biped. It was first time for me to do rigging using only bones, so it took a very long time. But the more I tried, I got used to it and got better and better. The first rat animation I made was walking with 2 legs. It almost looks like he is on drugs.
I have to fix it and I will later. I learned that references are always important for animations like modeling. Since our job is to embody reality, we must create it by referring to photos and actions of reality.
Yesterday with reference videos, I made this animation. Our team accepted my idea of rat movement so I had to make it. It is way better than walking animation.
Then I exported them and put them in Unreal Engine 5. This is the file I test some new skills I learned and my assets. To add more explanations, I made the dog model referenced by 'Party Animals' and used Mixamo animations to test the player movement. Anyway, I made a simple C++ script and used the animations and model I made. It worked well.
After this, I will finish polishing animations of rat walking and making gargoyle sitting motion. Also I want to finish making the main character before the prototype due.
5. Review
Before I started Capstone, I usually worked alone or worked with very few people without any regulations. I didn't know how complicated teamwork is and how hard discussion is. Moreover, we got to know one of our team member couldn't join capstone and she was in charge of many roles including game designer, level designer, character modeling and animations. So we had to reassign all the roles. Now I have to do all the modeling, riggings and animations. Moreover, this course is basically game programming and everyone needs to do programming, I also have to do programming. For me, it would be so hard and busy, but I hope I can learn a lot and build my portfolio well.
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