Big Game Project: Week 1

I’m working together with my team “Parhelion“ to create a vertical slice of a game in ten weeks for our “Big Game  Project” course . The game we are going to work on is Temple of light. Temple of light is a first person puzzle game where the player has to arrange mirrors to guide the light to reach a target, while also looking out for environmental hazards like traps, moving platforms and bottomless pits.  The game will be created using Unreal engine 4.

In this project I work as both Lead designer and Lead artist. My work this week has been more towards the art side of things. This week I’ve created the style guide, first overview concepts of one of the levels, On top of that I’ve been working with the level designer for creating the levels and the game’s also helped the others in the team getting started with Unreal engine 4 as I previously have worked with UDK and read up on some of the documentation about Unreal engine 4. Previous knowledge of Physical Based rendering, Layered materials. This week I’ve also been in contact with the artist making the music for our game, giving him some concepts of the game and some documentation to help him understand what the game is about.

Design:

I’ve mostly been testing the early paper prototype of the levels and giving feedback to the level designer.  One design decision we had to do this week was to remove the ability to tilt the mirrors forward and backwards as it ended up breaking most of the puzzles.  Now the player can only turn the mirrors side to side and the mirrors can instead be placed on top of a vertical moving platform to move it up and down.

Art:

When it comes to the art style my vision is that the game is to be mysterious but grounded in reality, meaning it have to evoke the players to want to explore this temple but it have to feel like a place that could exist. The temple is located in a desert and will have Arabic themed architecture. The overall theme for the game is “Light vs. Dark”.

Central hub concept

The first week I’ve worked on a concept for the first area” The Central hub”, this is area the player will visit multiple times. The central hub also heavily features the Visual progression.  The idea is that when the player completes a level they, they will get visual feedback in both the level and when they get back into the central hub.  The visual feedback the player gets in the central chamber is another Focus ring aligns that focus the light on the mirror on central statue. For example water added to fountain when the water level is completed and torches lit when fire level is completed.

Picture 1: The first sketch of the central hub level.

For the concept I decided to create a 3D model of the room in a 3d application and then render the room out so I could paint over it in Photoshop.  The result of the rendering can be found in the picture bellow. The actual 3d model didn’t take too long to create, but what I didn’t expect was the rendering time. There was one really good thing about making  creating the room in 3d first and that is that the assets I’ve already created can be exported out of the scene and sent to a 3d artist to work from.

Picture 2: Rendered 3D image of the central hub

 After the rendering was done I painted over the 3d image changed the lighting from the image little bit and added the statue and textures.

Picture 3: Final result

Unreal engine 4

One of the things I had to this week as to help the rest of team get started with Unreal engine 4.  I also had to learn the artists about PBR as I had been working with PBR materials for about two months already. The reason we decided upgrade from UDK to Unreal engine 4 for our project as it allowed our programmer to work in C++, as we only have one programmer this is a big deal for us.

Switching the engine also meant we had to work out how the new art pipeline should work, this is something I will have to continue working on next week as I’m looking into how to use layered materials in Unreal engine 4.