@Snaffy

With the semester coming to an end, and deadlines getting closer and closer, we have to write more and more ‘documentation’ blog posts to cover our behinds from the lecturers who loom over each of our projects. 

Character Woes.

Character development on my end has been fairly relaxed, with the process of our character simply going as follows;

A draft is produced, and a character is decided, in our example, I’ll take Kevin who is a bit of a meme because of how many versions of him there are.

“Kevin is the friendly face that you are first introduced to in the game prologue, he’s the guy that looks like he’d throw everything aside to help you out” 

So my first thought would have been, golden retriever, loyal and friendly right?

Oh dear lord, what is that?  This is the first draft of Kevin, friendly-looking? sure, but it looks like that dark entity that resides in the dark corner of your bedroom.

We quickly revised that made him appear to be more of a dog this time around.

But ultimately, we had to rework him again with the direction of the other characters in development. Compared to them, he seemed like he was from another game altogether which was not good for us. 

So this time, following the procedures for the other characters created, we made him look more human-like, whilst retaining the character design elements that made him, himself. 

The end results are a drastic improvement over what we had before, with Kevin becoming a well-dressed individual that looks very dependable and characteristically “stupid friendly”.

The eyes are put in engine, don’t judge me.

Now as nice as all of this is, I wished it didn’t take as long for it to have come to where it is now. Looking back at the 27-28 different versions of Kevin makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking sometimes. 

One last look back before moving on.

Since I have run out of things to talk about, let's look back on this project overall and have a bit a critical review;

Things I liked about this project is the evolving nature of it, this project went from a plane building flight sim to a social-based adventure title with flight in a couple of months. The ideas generated for the group really reflects on the process of the project overall, and at times, it doesn’t feel like we are doing just a uni project but instead gives off more of a professional environment vibe when we are all on task and giving it our all. 

With that being said, I didn’t like how far we’ve moved off from the original idea. Call it developer’s remorse (like buyer’s remorse) or whatever, but I do look back often and wonder what would have happened if we kept the original darker themes that we had, as I do genuinely believe it would work better with the narrative we have. 

Overall project management has improved greatly, we’ve definitely been limited in scope due to bad time management in the past but this time around. We’ve definitely been able to keep on task whilst being able to reorganize and prioritize more urgent tasks rather than letting them drag us down like in the past.

Initial Post

Concept Development

Development Development

Crits, and Overall Thoughts

Because why make 10 posts and spam someone else’s feed

I&P has been been a rollercoaster and an absolute clusterfuck of an idea that we had to mishmash and filter to get to where we are today. With that being said, it is an absolute meme that I loved being part of.

Because I have to give some form of update at some point.

The idea has changed significantly, there is more of an emphasis on the VR adventure aspect now than there was before, as we have decided that we would not have enough time to be able to cover the flight mechanics to a satisfactory level. With that being said, it feels like it has been relegated further back in terms of priority, and also less of a selling point for the project as well. 

This is both good... and a bit disheartening, as while it means we have time to further refine what we have and ultimately improve it for open studio’s showcase, it does feel a tad bit worrying that a title like Aeronautica has nothing to do with aircraft at the current moment.

3d Modeling for Dummies.

In terms of Art updates and whatnot, we’ve been steadily adding models into the project, updating and refining the barren landscape with buildings and terrain features. With that being said, we’ve definitely run into some performance problems in the week or so that has halted further development, at least until they are sorted. 

The program, SketchUp, in which I use to create the buildings is a blessing and a curse to work with as on one hand, it allows for me to create the architecture at blatantly fast speeds, frees up time for the 3d modelers to do more important tasks and has saved our asses for one of the major deadlines, where we had the project show to a larger audience in New Caledonia. But, the trade-off is the poor integration into our engine, where it lacks UV maps (which is required to texture the buildings) and has conflicts with the engine and refuses to let the lightmap bake in which costs up a good amount of performance. 

UI Woes

As of right now, while waiting for the tech monkeys to sort out the optimization, I am revising the UI elements or rather lack of as we’ve received plenty of feedback that addresses the issue of the participants not knowing what to do. This is a fair and valid argument as we do not have any form of tutorial to introduce the player to any of the mechanics or controls we have set up right now, however, we do hope to sort it out before the showcase. 

We’ve had a talk to our lecturer about how the UX could potentially be added for VR as there aren’t a lot of good examples on how to create a clear and instruction stylized UI for the platform. How just a prompt alone won’t be able to guide the player into understanding the controls unless there is some sort of voice/action that accompanies it. A good example is the image above, I do say this with a strong level of bias as a developer, but I would have thought that the button prompt on the controller is more than enough let someone know that pressing in the two buttons on the controller (squeezing the grips) would grasp onto the handle. However, with a voice prompt from an NPC telling them to take the wheel, it would be a bit more obvious. 

Another suggestion made to us was to have little instructables on the screen whenever the player looks at an object of interest, similar to wikihow’s simplistic and yet informative method. So in this example, say the player has been told to start up the engine to a motorboat, the player wouldn’t necessarily know how to start it up off the top of their head so rather, we’d have it that when the player sees the engine (or when it is onscreen) a little widget pops up with a line tracking to the start cord with say a simple 2 frame animation showing that they have to grip the cord and pull away. 

Changes, deadlines and copyright strikes?

As we progress, I feel like we are really evolving our ideas for this project; the initial ideas we had weren’t necessarily scraped but we did realize that we had to make some changes;

Upon chatting with Laurant, who is also a big fan of the movie we draw inspiration from (bonus points from me!) quickly was able to identify that we were pretty much remaking that world we see on screen in a different format. Understanding this we agreed that yeah, we were very much using that idea as a platform to start off but reassured him that we were merely using the platform to take off from (no pun intended).

And yes, we always have planned to change, but I do believe that we should keep some elements from our source inspiration. The pig flying a red plane is surely iconic and is something that just about anyone who has seen Porco Rosso will be able to recognize. We can’t copy that as far as I am concerned to due us not wanting a copyright infringement to kick start our careers, but using the Mediterranean like setting mixed with a few influences from various cultures would most definitely do us good. In fact, one of the many sprint goals we have is to have phase one of our vertical slice done by September in order to make a deadline given to us by Laurant so we can demo our hard work in New Caledonia.

The development side of things.

Currently, I am sudo-managing two and a half guys whilst doing my current workload, and admittedly its a bit harder than I expected as I know I have my own deadlines and goals to meet but to also have to provide sketches for the modeling team, work on texturing, managing the layout and white boxing is quite the handful to juggle. I’d like to thank Max for taking over the management time to time, as it does free up a bit of my mind to focus my attention on my own tasks at hand. It does really help me out a lot. 

From the time freed up, I was able to sketch up some more “junkplane” ideas that we can work with going forth, with the idea of building a seaplane from scratch taking a more grounded idea that seemed a bit more plausible. So here's this boat that we’ve kinda wedged and engine and ducted tape some wings on to it. It flies!, I swear! is the kind of approach that I took when drawing up the rough concepts. More development is needed as the idea isn't too concrete at the moment. As my time is currently occupied doing;

Character Concepts;

Admittedly, our first character is nothing too good to come by, but seeing as Kevin as we call him is quite literally the good two-shoes character that is super friendly and fairly generic... I’ll give him a pass for now.

I’ll likely go back and give him an update whenever I can find the time to do so. In the meantime, I’ve already sketched up the concept for one of our other key characters; Steve who is grizzly old lighthouse keeper who is quite unfriendly towards others.

I’m not too fond of this character, I did sketch him up on less than an hour so quality and thought process behind the conscious decisions in making this character are lacking. That being said, I'm just glad he is no longer on my to-do list as I have quite a lot of things to texture over the next few days. Steve the grumpy old fart of a bulldog is now in the hands of the modeling team to be created.

There is one other thing I should blog about but honestly not much has been done to warrant a blog about it yet. That is the white boxing and layout out of the town in which I’ll likely cover whenever my next blog. Till then I’ll be closely working with our scriptwriter Jack in order to make sure everything in the town is where it needs to be and will likely revise the layout with him, as he would know whats best for the town.

Let's jump back to 2018;

Aeronautica, this semester’s project was a proposal idea (link to which is here) that first brought up this time last year when we had our initial brainstorming sessions;

Back then, due to the brief we had, we were not able to properly use the idea as we felt it was far too safe for the rather experimental brief we got. However, that being said, just about everyone in the group had agreed it was a damn good idea that would be market viable (at least in our opinion) just from the initial small pitch.

Come 2019, things have changed and Aeronautica was brought out from the closet and lovingly dusted off by the team. All it took was for us to sell out to Laurent for once.

A world of change;

Well since being dusted off, and surprisingly, a lot of, if not all the ideas from back then are retained in our current proposal with a bit more tacked on and some refinement of others.

We initially struggled to give some more context and meaning to this project, as we wanted more meaning behind it. Meaning like how 11-bit studios, who are behind titles like This war of mine and Frostpunk seem to incorporate into their game;

This war of mine is a commentary on the human side of war, playing from the perspective of a civilian caught in the crossfire.

Frostpunk is based on a future climate change has rendered the planet mostly inhabitable for humans due to extreme weather conditions.

Our greater meaning;

Our greater meaning/context came through as human endeavor, escapism and debatably immigration. We wanted to have perseverance as an ongoing theme, especially in the early game of this project. The idea of those around you telling you that something can not be done, whether it be physically, economically or just by situationally impossible yet you persevering through and achieving a goal is something we would love to explore.

Changing faces.

Delving deeper into the idea of challenging perspectives, we had decided early on that non-euclidean level design was definitely going to play a part in our project as we found it the easiest and most effective way of doing so. 

After watching a few videos, grasping the concept of it all and finding a fairy dodgy link to someone’s attempt of a portal system I was ready to give a go at the idea of non-euclidean layout:

Off to a great start indeed.

A brief but not so detailed explanation.

Right... I’m not going to detail every change I did to make this bloody thing work but I will give a rundown of how it works and ultimately what and why this is important to our project. 

So to begin, the portal blueprints themselves use a screen-capture component that continuously captures what is in front of it and sets it as a dynamic material instance that is assigned to the portal plane/mesh. Oddly enough, I discovered through trial and error that the plane/mesh needs to have a bit of a concave in the shape in order for it to work properly, otherwise, a very obvious flicker would appear and tear through the screen ruining the illusion of a seamless step through. Imagine a contact lens basically, and that's the kind of shape will work.

There is a simple check made every tick in engine that determines whether the player is within range of a portal plane or not (the volume seen in the screenshot). Once that condition is met, the portal would check teleport itself to another assigned portal within the game space in all honesty, that's it really.

In place are a bunch of checks that determine the player’s distance to the portal they want to step through, their speed as they move through the portal, the player’s current orientation relative to the portals, the locations of each portal, the player’s current height and whether the player is currently crouching or not as they enter the portal.

Fullsized version here.

The results of which are linked below as tumblr doesn’t like large format gifs over 10mb.

Test One, getting set up to render properly.

Test Two, seeing if they can mirror scenes.

Test Three, multiple portal setups.

Honestly though, why don’t gifs work properly with tumblr?

What and Why?

So with this system in place, we have now have the ability to displace the player, more or less shifting the world around them without them ever knowing that they are descending further down the rabbit hole more. Paired with the narrative that we have in place, this will create unique transitions and environments in which both the player can explore and paths that we as the developers can open up to them. 

A good example of this would be this particular video from 7 years ago showcasing what could be done in a sense of scale and overall mindfuckery. 

The power of suggestion.

When we did the playtesting, some month or two ago, we had gone in simply to observe what would happen if we had given them the notion of being in a false reality. We hadn’t given too much thought about it at the point, it was a dip into what our project was going to be like with an audience that most likely hadn’t given too much thought about simulation theory (BCT students).  But from what we observed... it went more or less exactly as I thought it would have. Given the simple line of “escape the simulation” and no further instructions, most people went right for the door and looked back at us to see if they had done the right thing or not.

To me, this is seen as the path of least resistance, the easiest way out basically. However, there was a portion of the participants that scavenged around the room, seeking a more conclusive answer to the whole experiment. I can tell that they had probably looked at the door initially and thought “nah, it can’t be this simple”. Only then do they find a note that would explicitly say “Do not leave the room” in which their actions are reconciled.

This is a good sign. Once again, to me, this means there is an incentive to dig further into the whole project from the player’s (for a lack of better terms) point of view, to find an ending of some sort to the project. Personally, I’d like to delve deeper into this idea that people could be directed of coaxed into a lie and find out whether they would be able to make correct decisions or not.

Blog Index: Bard.

1. Group Name and Justification.

2. Roles and Direction.

3. Initial Concepts

4. Working Ideas (Part One)

5. Working Ideas (Part Two)

6. Digital Translation of Ideas

7. Creative Refinement 

8. A Hero’s Journey 

9. Being Worked to Death.

10. A Long Time Coming

11. Angry Week + More Work.

12. The Events Leading Up To Now.

13. Closing Words.

At the beginning of this semester, I opted to take on the role of creative director for our project, a role that I have comfortably assumed in many projects before so it seemed fitting that I took on that role. I will say that I regret taking on that role to a certain extent as I felt that I took the safe route when it comes academics, nothing I did was out of my comfort zone, I didn’t take risks nor experiment with disciplines outside my field.

My role meant that I would be in charge of the visual side of the project, and I must say that I feel that what I put out was not up to par at all. Its a case of “if we had just a bit more time”, more time to refine and really get things to where we all wanted, It would have been really awe-inspiring, moody and atmospheric. Instead, it feels rushed and underdeveloped to look at (at least for me). I won’t go as far to say that I am not proud of my work, to say that is to undermine all the work and effort that my team and I sank into this project. Rather I will say that I am rather disappointed at myself for not being able to fully adapt to different toolsets provided by the programs used.

 I wish I had a more direct role when it came to management, where I could have had a bit more of an impact when it came to quality control. I am not gonna slander my team-mate who worked selflessly alongside me, however, due to other commitments to other parts of our project, not all the work he was producing was up to scratch. The reason why I would have liked a more of a manager role was so I could more effectively pass on my thoughts of what needs to be done or taken as a priority in terms of what was being made, rather than being hard stuck with tasks that I had to do. I feel like this would have allowed me to communicate with Kelvin and James a lot more with what I expect from them, rather than tell them to do what they think would be best for the project. After all, a director that doesn’t direct others toward a goal isn’t really a director, right?

There is definitely room for improvement, as a group, we have only just formed this semester and produced a solid working prototype from a rather confusing and a bit unorthodox pitch in a time span of 14 weeks. We could definitely work on our comms, as we are all friends, adapting to a more professional tone was a bit hard. As an individual, my goals definitely met, although with some slack on my part. Moving on, I’d like to be more vocal about decisions made within our group, especially if it has anything to do with the visual aspects. 

Finding Solace.

With the amount of time remaining before our due date ticking down, final touches and mildly annoying bug fixing are being done. I can say with certainty that I have learned quite a few things in the last few weeks.

Like how a touch of color can bring a vivid impression, however, a lack of color can do the same, if not more with less effort. That being said, the relentless long nights and ambitions for the project are starting to take their toll on not only me but my entire group. We are at the point of ending each day burnt out and longing for an end to this pressure we all feel. With each mundane task after another, I oddly find entertaining ways to stop myself from wanting to gouge my eyes out from staring at my computer monitor for so long. 

Whether it be small breaks where I can look over and pet my cat sleeping soundly on my bed, or when a favorite of mine gets repeated for the 5th time on my music player. Such little things can bring so much joy for so little.

I will be fine. Probably.

A long weekend of stress and overworked tears.

I think I can say on behalf of my entire group that despite the stress of an ever-closing deadline, lack of communication (once again) from a certain team member, and task upon task that don’t stop piling. We have grown used to it. 

Perhaps this is what it feels like to grow up?  That aside, we are nearing completion and it felt right to blog at least once more before the due date, to cover at least what went down on the last week;

We shifted into overdrive by Tuesday evening, with everyone having a strong sense of direction in what they needed to do. Wednesday was a clusterfuck with tables and stuff being shifted around, to make up for time lost that day, I opted to stay home and get the level finalized in terms of layout and collisions.

Tomorrow brings me to finish up on any bits of the level that still needs adjusting, starting with the textures for our main character so it's no longer just a green blob man and starting on the trailer for our project hopefully on Saturday.

To explain my processes, tasks, and role.

 Shortly after the first assignment was completed, me and Andrew had gotten together and discussed what was next, after the first project together we had decided that we where gonna remain together along with James for the second part of this paper. Though, what came next surprised me. You see, in our discussion at some point either one of us had brought up the idea of modeling a model of an actual location. I thought it was genius as to me, it was a loophole in which we could literally make any environment we wanted so long as we made a physical scaled-down model of said environment.

Well... it ended up being a box, a puzzle box in our half-assed restaurant resided to which I dubbed, Kimchi Robotic Sustenance.

The beginnings.

After acquiring a box of some sort and one trip to the mechatronics lab to look for stuff to add into our box of wonders we were largely done with the physical model, behold in all its glory;

Yes, I am not joking that was seriously what we agreed to, finding a rustic charm in its state of hot glue markings and scrap thrown together in a hurry.

My role and tasks in this joke gone wrong.

We divided up the tasks at hand, Andrew modeling the objects, James texturing them and Me putting it all together in UE4. That being said, I dabbled quite a pit into my pairs tasks a lot too;

I ended up doing quite a large chunk of the modeling, though I must admit that they were largely basic shapes so that Andrew wouldn’t have to do it and also A bit of texturing for said basic shapes so that James wouldn’t have to do that either as I could do the same in under 2 mins in UE4.

A look into a terrible joke.

Self-explanatory, here are some screenshots from what is a near-complete version as of the time of posting this blog;

We have also modeled one of the tables along with a desk divider, all those post it notes and sheets of paper will be used wisely in the near future (tomorrow) for more bad jokes and references.

Note; I gave up on the cubemap (skybox).

I tried to replicate the many different light sources from inside studio with some success, I will admit here that I honestly didn’t really try as it wasn't a priority for me, so instead I slapped in a few more directional light sources to accomplish that goal.

Once James finishes off the final textures and gives them to me to put in engine, I reckon this will look quite cool. Especially in VR.

Final Thoughts.

A change of heart.

There have been a few changes since the last time I blogged about this project.  First of which is the engine switch that occurred as a result of engine complexity. We initially decided to work with Unreal Engine 4 but ran into a few compatibility issues with the plugins for our instrumental device to work, ultimately we switched to Unity simply as it worked.

Since then, I have been working on mainly level design and the environmental related stuff along with some management of our asset production pipeline.

Stuff I found interestingly annoying.

This is where I bitch a bit about unity being unity and comment about what I myself have done in the last week or so.

Perhaps it is my lack of understanding of Unity itself, but time after time I have found myself saving the project and then forwarding so that Max, the other person working in engine can receive updates for the environment as I make them only for the changes I made magically disappearing into the digital void.

Regardless, I have almost completed the entrance level to the temple in which the player will be exploring for the majority of our project, though as I said, almost. Post-processing seems to like to fuck with me quite a bit between two computers, where I make a change on my laptop at uni only for it either revert to its previous values once I get home or for it to change entirely. 

Goals and Future Stuff.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to white box the entire temple section by next week Wednesday so that we can show off what we’ve done and all to the lecturers so that we can knock their socks off, however with our minors in the way, that goal may either not be a reality or half - 3/4s the way complete. Its a shame really but with my weekends occupied by work and the upcoming day’s attention needing to be shifted towards my minors, it will be quite difficult to focus my attention on solely this project.

That aside, the temple section is going well. I find that making ruined structures is something of my forte, I find making half destroyed / neglected buildings is quite easy and enjoyable for me, though I feel that I put a bit too much thought than I need to into it. One thing that I will never get used to is how Unity does it’s lighting, whereas Unreal Engine handles each instance of light sources via channels, effectively sectioning off parts of the light sources to be handled in one thread, Unity doesn’t, effectively meaning that real-time lighting will have a significant impact on performance if done incorrectly.