Dynamic Time of Day

In the game you’re supposed to find survivors buried under the rubble of a bombed city and then dig them up. In order to meet deadlines, the game was designed with this feature abstracted to a press of a button and an ensuing cinematic sequence. In order to communicate to the player that time passes during this we decided to have a controllable day and night cycle. In order to save time we decided to use Unreal Engine’s built in […]

Visual Aid

For the player to easier see what they are doing we used a couple of visual aids. Early on we used a particle emitter emitting invisible particles that would spawn visible particles when colliding with the ground to show where you are focusing your listening.

This was hard to spot, not very cost effective and hard to control. I had looked in to how to project materials onto surfaces but had somehow missed deferred decals which does exactly that. Setting this […]

Asoth

Buckle up – another post without any relevant or particularly good images (because I wrote this post directly after the last one instead of weeks ago, like I should have…. *cough*)
So, this post will be about the second enemy character that was created; Asoth. The Asoth used to be mages, but, just like the Zagam from the previous post, an evil sorcerer brought them back to life as demons. Asoths are skeleton like, with big thorns growing from their shoulders. […]

Spectrometer Data

Originally I wanted the spectrometer data to be calculated in real time based on every sound that was played. While not impossible, decompressing audio in real time to do this would be inefficient. My next idea was to extract the spectrometer data externally and parse it in to the game. This would probably have been the optimal solution, but when talking to our tutor he advised against it and told us to fake it. And fake it I did.

So what […]

Week 5: From substance painter to 3D Coat

Hi, this week I’ve worked with the texturing of the Orc patient.
Earlier on tries have been made to make simple placeholder textures in substance painter, these attempts brought forth a problem that had to be solved. In substance painter there is no possibility to draw across different meshes without swapping between them in the hierarchy. This made it near impossible to draw a shaded and well defined texture and matching it up between meshes


Making a seem well textured […]

Zagam

So – moving on to the next character!
Let me introduce to you; Zagam! *intense music*
A rather unclear image of Zagam, but you get the idea. 
This is the first enemy that we produced, simply because our Lead Artist thought it was the most fun to model. The ‘race’ Zagam is created by the evil sorcerer that is terrorising the country, who wakes all killed men and turns them into Zagams, a creature of stone and fire who bulldozes everything it […]

Tablet Material

Our sensor audio output was to be visualized on a tablet screen. For this, I’d need spectrometer data from the audio files that were playing, but before getting a hold of that, I needed some way of visualizing the data. At the time I had not yet worked much with Unreal Engine’s material graph. I have written shaders in both HLSL (high-level shading language) and GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) so I had a vague idea of what I was getting […]

Big Game Project Post 5

This post will mainly be about the 3D modelling, UV mapping and texturing that went in the last week before GGC.
Somewhere between 1-2 weeks before GGC we had to make some changes to our graphics to save time. Therefor i sat down one day, locked myself up in my apartment and started creating a human base. With this i could create all remaining characters to the same quality, reusing the same animations, rigg and most of the skinning. This was […]

Easy level making

Hi! In todays blogpost I would like to talk about how we made our levels in A Rat Betwixt.
The levels are designed around the game being square-grid based and around the overlooking camera angle.
The first step to creating  a room for the level is whiteboxing an idea in the engine. The one I am showing today ended up looking like this:
The whiteboxed room in the engine shot from straight above
As you can see in the picture I have left room […]

BGP – 6

In last post I talked about bikes and bike stands etc! So I guess now I should introduce the school…

The good thing about our game is that we had a time limit. That basically means the player doesn’t have too much time to roam around and investigate the environment and notice all the possible things that could be missing. There can be so much weird things located in classrooms, especially in elementary school because they are filled with drawings made […]

A new beginning: Rune Mages in retrospect!

Time has come once again to write on this blog. This time, I will be writing about my second-year project, Rune Mages! Again, I was the Lead Programmer, and as such I will be discussing topics primarlily concerning structuring the systems behind the scenes.
See you soon!

Big Game Project Post 4

Since i’ve been incredibly bussy with BGP, GGC (Gotland Game Conference) and moving i haven’t been able to upload my posts on schedule. I’ve been living without internet lately but finally made it to the mainland/Stockholm back to my home town Norrtälje where i have internet.
This post will mainly be about the UI(User interface), the decisions i had to make and why.
The Project A Rat Betwixt is a game that takes place on a main screen, a tv for example […]