Week 32, Year 2: Alice's Adventures Off The Map Post-Mortem.

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that for the past 14 weeks I have been working on a project with 5 other Game Art students called Alice’s Adventures, Off the Map. Hosted by GameCity, Off the Map challenges students to use collections from the British Library as inspiration to create interactive digital media. DMU has participated since it began a few years ago as part of the second year curriculum. Game Art students in the past have been very successful and all of us were very excited for the competition. So at the start of February, we were placed into teams, given the brief and cut loose.

In our first team meeting, we began by discussing how we could impress the judges and win the competition. This was our first and probably most severe mistake. Of all the changes, difficulties and decisions I’ll discuss here, I feel this mind-set right from the start was the greatest hindrance to our project. Despite being a team of artists, we felt pressed to create a game. A complete and well-rounded interactive experience. Because of this, all of our early work and decisions were driven by trying to create a game. Something none of us have any experience in. What we should have done is play to our strengths. We should have designed a world first, and then added interactive elements and gameplay. While that statement flies in the face of conventional game design, we are not a conventional game development team. We are a team of 6 artists. It’s a question of priorities and our first priority should have always been simply, create something beautiful.

Of the three themes we could choose from, we picked Oxford, as we felt it was the most interesting. In the first week, I organised a trip to visit Oxford for a day, to gather reference, get a feel for the town and search for inspiration. Hiring a car was expensive and planning it all was exhausting, but it was one of the best things we did. It brought us closer as a team, we had a great time and it got us out of Leicester for a day. I’ve come to really appreciate that a change of scene is absolutely invaluable.

The closest we got to a team photo.

In the first few weeks we also setup a blog. Having a tool to divide the documentation work, right from the start, worked really well. None of us like to write when there's painting to be done, but updating it regularly allowed us to stay on top of it as a team. We found it very useful to keep our tutors in the loop throughout the project and notify them of any changes.

One of the biggest changes that took place was the decision to move from our original 'courtyard, street and river bank' idea, to the 'foggy streets' plan, in an attempt to cut back the amount of assets we'd need to create. While it was a good decision, it was made too hastily. We did need to dramatically reduce the scope of our project, but we did so without taking the time to properly visualize the new idea.

Layout plans. 'Foggy streets' (left) and 'river bank' (right).

Visualization ought to have played a central role to our work, however I feel we severely neglected that critical part of the process. As a team, we didn't take concepting as seriously as we should have and we were too distracted by 'the game idea'. The majority of the early concepts we produced were paintings for the sake of painting. With the exception of a good deal of overpaints, the lack of visual development throughout was another major barrier to a successful final outcome.

I especially missed an opportunity to do more concepting at the start of the project, but as usual it seems I was distracted by technical problems. My primary complaint these past few months has been feeling shackled to the engine. I learned a lot, but being the sole 'engine guy' was quite miserable, especially towards the end. However in hindsight this was largely self-inflicted, as we could have made major improvements in the way we divided the work.

Once a level reaches a certain size, using the usual 'make a list and distribute it evenly' method of assigning assets is inadequate. I learned this too late unfortunately, but it's a mistake I won't repeat. If I were to go back and do it again, I would allocate work by area, rather than by each individual asset. Everyone would be responsible for their section of the level, from concepting through to engine. This would diversify the work load, encourage team members to take pride in the key areas rather than individual assets, and promote seeking help and feedback from one another.

 The Apothecary.

The Lane.

The Streets.

The Alley.

The Florist.

The Garden.

I am left with mixed feelings at the end of this project. As you may have guessed at this point, I'm quite disappointed with our final outcome. We could have produced something of much higher quality, if we had only made better decisions. Our team should have achieved something vastly superior to what we did, but while we all work well individually, for a variety of reasons we don't work well as a group. This has been a monumentally frustrating experience, but I do feel I learned from it.

A small, masochistic part of me wants to go back and do it again, now that I can see all the places we took a wrong turn. But a big part of me is just glad it's over. Still, for next time:

• Visual Development and Communication is pivotal to the success of a project. Concepts should only serve to move an idea forward and improve the project. In future, I'll take this more seriously and ensure that I'm not wasting time with pretty pictures.
• An opportunity for a change of scene shouldn't be missed. We all probably spend too much time behind our desks. I certainly do, so next year I'm going to make more of an effort to visit different places.
• Divide the work up by area, not by asset. I had previously thought that the best way to divide tasks in a group was to delineate the work as much as possible and allocate it based on individual strengths and weaknesses. I was wrong. Next time, I will divide the work by area and not shy away from assigning challenging tasks to team members.
• Encourage and support one another. I think I underestimate the value of positive reinforcement and it's something I could definitely improve. Moving forward I will make an effort to be more encouraging.
• Make decisions based on what will make life easier. Work smarter, not harder. At the beginning of this project, we were all encouraged to create a 3D side-scroller. We chose not to, which in hindsight was probably a big mistake. Had we done a side-scroller, we would have avoided a lot of the problems we encountered.

It feels like I've been working on this forever, even though it's only been a few months. But then again, it's the longest project I've worked on nearly 3 times over. It's been a hell of a ride but if it pays off next year, it'll all have been worth it. See you then.

Week 31, Year 2: Grouping Actors in Unreal Engine.

It's a week too early for a post-project rant about Off the Map, the deadline is this Friday, so instead I thought I'd put together a few quick tips and tricks regarding the groups feature in Unreal Engine. Grouping actors is extremely useful for managing sets of items in a level and something I've been using a lot this week. In this example, I'll show you how I took 4 books to fill the shelves in a shop, using groups and copying for speed, and mirroring to hide repetition.

Quick side note: In some cases, an actor blueprint may be more appropriate. The advantage of using groups is it's quick and very, very simple.

To get started, I take a shelf that's been filled with books and group the books by hitting Ctrl+G. A green bounding box will appear to signify a locked group. The actors in the group now share a single transform and can be manipulated as one. Shift+G ungroups the actors.

Each set of shelves is filled with a group of books. At this point I'll start to notice things that might need tweaking a bit, usually because they're floating or clipping in to something. A quick way to fix this is to unlock the group with Right Click > Groups > Unlock, which will turn the bounding box red and allow you to move the actors individually.

A quicker way is to simply toggle group mode with Ctrl+Shift+G whenever you need to make adjustments.

Now that I have my groups, I hold Alt+Drag them along an axis to copy them to the next shelf over. To avoid having two identical groups next to one another, I re-arrange and mirror each set.

In order to mirror an actor in Unreal Engine, you need to bind the command to a key. For some reason it's unbound by default. Go to Editor Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and search for Mirror. Bind the X, Y and Z mirror commands to any key you like, (I use Ctrl+Shift+X, Y and Z respectively) and you're good to go.

I repeat this process of copying, re-arranging and mirroring until all the shelves are filled. Once they're filled, I toggle groups off and start deleting books or replacing them with other assets to further break up the repetition.

So that's how I take 4 assets, whether they're books, drain pipes or houses and re-use them over and over again. Hopefully this helps a few people out and saves some time. Good luck for the hand in everyone!

Week 30, Year 2: Time Lord Resubmission Post-Mortem.

The 'dichotomy character project' was by far my weakest project of the year. Due to poor planning, an overambitious idea, and falling ill, I produced an absolutely atrocious pair of characters. Happily, we were all given the chance to resubmit the project before the end of the year, so I've been working on it in the evenings, in-between writing essays and working on Off the Map.

I decided to drop the second character stretch goal and just focus on getting the one character right. I had limited spare time to work on it, but I wanted to produce something polished all the same. This is also the first time I've used Zbrush for a complete sculpt. As the original model was such a disaster, I decided to totally redo it. I'm quite pleased with the results and it's certainly a vast improvement!

The face and clothes came out well but I struggled with the shoulder piece. I'm aware that amazing hard surface results are possible in Zbrush, but I'm not even close to proficient enough with the software to be able to achieve them. I knew this would be a sticking point for me so I chose to use the original Timelord design, despite it being quite flat and plain.

I would've liked to incorporate more asymmetrical elements and varied materials to break up the character. I feel the main thing that's lacking is complexity and visual interest. I focused too much on tinkering with the DOTA 2 shader, when I should've been painting textures and trying to match the art style rather than the tech stuff.

It was also my first crack at retopology. Surprisingly, it went very smoothly. It's definitely something I will use in the future, so it was nice to get my head around it. But it was a slow process, as the characters modular nature required me to retopologize it piece by piece. 

This also became very time consuming during texturing, as each piece requires a set of 10 maps and masks. As the character was broken up into 8 'components', I had to author 80 of these which slowed me down significantly.

I learned a lot from redoing this project. While the final result is far from perfect, I feel that if I was to repeat the project a third time, I would finally get it spot on.

So, next time I will:

• Use more asymmetrical elements, varied materials and visual complexity to add interest. I should settle on the design, down to the details, from the start of the project.
• Be mindful of the tri-count and how it will be rigged during the design process. I wasted triangles on the hands by modelling individual fingers, which would be rigged using a maximum of 3 bones. I could've also used more triangles to add more interest to the silhouette.
• Don't use a primarily visual project as a technical exercise. I should have ensured accurate anatomy and proportion were in place before worrying about tools and software. This was the root of a lot of the problems I encountered throughout both the original and re-submitted project.
• Plan better. The first time round, the plan was wildly overambitious. The second time round, I wasted time as a result of not planning enough. Had I reduced the number of modular pieces, I would've had more time for iteration and stretch goals.

Week 29, Year 2: Presentations.

First week back!..Aaand I need another holiday, the last one didn't count. I spent most of my working hours over Easter writing my reflective essay and redoing my character project. I also worked on Off the Map (a bit) and spent some time preparing the 'carte blanche' presentation, which I gave this week.

I chose to do my presentation on skydiving and the challenges of simulating flight in a wingsuiting game, such as Volo airsport. I wanted to do it on a subject that I felt was interesting and something from which I could draw on my own experience.

I was surprised by how nervous I was. It's amazing how difficult it is to stand in front of people and talk about a subject in a formal, coherent way. I had a script memorised which seemed fine in practice, but somehow being in front of other humans changes how you feel about it completely.

I didn't have a meltdown though and I got through it. Among other things, I could've spoken clearer and fidgeted less, but I hit all my points, I knew my slides well and the presentation hopefully came across as well prepared.

Plus anything with this gif in it's got to be pretty good, right?

The Birdly device.

It was remarked that my presentation could have touched on whether or not VR should even try to replicate the thrill of flying. My presentation actually began as just that, but I quickly realized that 3 minutes was not enough time. My first draft covered this as concisely as I could and I still ended up talking at a million miles an hour.

As I continued to research, practice and revise the presentation, it quickly became a pitch for a VR simulation game. I'm not sure that this was the best choice, but for this presentation it seems the content is the least important part. For next time, I learned:

• Before doing anything else, pick an appropriate topic and work out what is a reasonable amount of information to convey in the allocated time. Educate, convey an idea, or make a point, but be clear from the start.
• I get more nervous than I anticipate, but this isn't an issue as long as I've practiced my slides and I know the material very well.
• Even for extremely short, timed presentations, a 'script' may not be suitable. Consider the environment and be clear on the formality of the presentation from the start.

So I'm pretty stressed out at the moment, it seems like all the 'grade stuff' like essays and character projects have all sprung out at once. The deadline for all that is at the end of this week. 

At least after that I only have to work on one project until we finish for the year – in less than three weeks.

Week 24, Year 2: A Big Fat Cloud of Misery.

Nothing works. The weeks keep going by and things keep breaking. As we cross the half way mark on our Off the Map project, I feel my enthusiasm eroding steadily by the day. Some of the problems we've encountered in our level seem to have no resolution, despite us trying every possible fix we can think of. Spending the majority of my time trying to find solutions to technical problems is extremely wearisome and I've been feeling less like an artist as the project progresses.

At least things are starting to come together though and it's beginning to feel like we're approaching a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if it's very faint right now. I've moved on from blueprints and effects, to creating assets of my own and that's a huge relief, it feels like I'm actually creating something.

On Monday, I went to London. I went to renew my passport at the French embassy and spent the day with my mum and sister. Even though it was meant to be a day off, it was the most inspired and motivated I've felt in weeks. I took a pen out and drew at every opportunity.

This year has been challenging. Staying motivated and inspired has been difficult at times, but that's beyond the scope of this blog post. Fortunately, we've just been set an extended writing piece, so I'll cover this topic in more detail there, and put some thought in to how I can be more positive moving forward. I'm sure by the time I've finished writing it, I'll feel right as rain.

Week 23, Year 2: A Little Ray of Sunshine.

I've been working on atmosphere and effects this week. Specifically fog and crepuscular rays (god rays). Fortunately there are a couple of great examples, but it was still quite a challenge.

I made it though. And they work! I'm rather proud of them.

Shimmering sun rays and floaty fog!

It was difficult, but I enjoyed myself. Last week, I was finding a lot of the engine work quite a chore because it felt totally technical and...'Non-arty'? - Let me know if you can think of a better word for that. This week however, I felt significantly better about the work I was doing and it was much more rewarding.

New features create new problems however, and the latest one is; Clouds, we need some. I've no idea where to start with this one. I've done some googling and came across trueSky but I'm not sure if that's allowed or not. I'll have to figure it out one way or another, it's pretty crucial to the final part of our level!

Peckwater Quad block out.

View of Peckwater Quadrangle by Hugh O'Neill

I did a lot of personal work this week as well, but once again it seems I've started too many large projects and long paintings. I know I really shouldn't, and it's really bad for my productivity, but the temptation to start a new project is hard to resist. Especially when I'm not fully engaged with what I'm working on at uni. I'm pretty sure it's an addiction.

But I'll stop it and do some reasonably scoped personal projects. When the ones I've started are finished. Probably.

Week 22, Year 2: Bleurghprints.

Now in the second week of development, our Oxford level for Alice's Adventures Off The Map is starting to take shape. My main responsibility in this project is the Engine, so I'm assembling the level from the ground up. Rather literally this week as I've been focusing on the terrain.

Using Unreal Engine's Landscape Feature was new to me but, at least on the surface, I found it really easy to grasp and I was quickly able to add the bumpy, cobbled streets to our level. However creating the Landscape Material was much more difficult. I wanted to be able to paint in the grass and mud, and have it blend with greater weight in the cracks of the cobblestone; a task which proved quite a challenge.

After many errors, a lot of engine weirdness and a good deal of help from a tutor, it's finally working. I'm nowhere near satisfied with my textures but they'll have to do for now and at least they're working!

I also got heavily into Unreal Engine's Blueprints this week. I've dabbled with them a little in previous projects, but now I'm really diving in. My goal was to create a scalable pickup system with interactive level objects and implement the crouch and jump mechanics noted in our level layout below.

Implementing the crouch and jump pickups was a piece of cake. Fun fact: the jump pickup literally is a piece of cake. The secondary scalable pickups however are something else entirely. Stupidly, I did the harder pickup task first. I had it working for a single, glorious day. Then I implemented the other mechanics and it promptly broke for no apparent reason.

Currently, I've no idea how to fix it. I will fix it, but there are countless more important things I need to get working and hey, maybe it'll fix itself...Ha! Yeah, not bloody likely. But on the bright side, in my week with Blueprints, I fixed more features than I broke, so I'm calling it a win.

Finally, some exciting news! I managed to grab Industry Workshop tickets for Anya and me, in the 10 minute window before they sold out. It's all the way off in September, but I'm already looking forward to filling up my inspiration balloons before my final year. It's going to be so, so good!

Week 21, Year 2: Another Week.

Another week fly's by and my team, Flaming Dodo, is making steady progress. This week we made a major change to our idea, so consequently I've been working a lot on grey boxes and layouts. You can read more about here.

This week, I've not done much art stuff within uni time, but I've been fairly careful to stick to my hours and make time for myself. I've started a couple of longer painting projects, been running at the gym, and finally got round to playing episode 2 of Telltale's Game of Thrones.

It's pretty good so far. It's Game of Thrones, so I'm pretty much going to like it by default but it's a really well made, beautiful and engaging game. It's relaxing to, so it's just what my brain needs after an 8 hour stint in Unreal Engine.

I'm struggling to really get into our group project at the moment. Perhaps that'll change as we progress, but currently I often find myself wishing I was working on other things. I'm sure it's only temporary though and it's not a problem, so long as I keep working on my personal projects in my own time.

To sign off on a positive, I noticed my life drawing make another jump lately. I unavoidably missed a few sessions recently but I'm going to try and build up some momentum with it again. It's extremely satisfying, so I'd really like to sustain my progression and keep getting better!

A recent life drawing I'm reasonably proud of.

Week 20, Year 2: Fun and Games.

You may have read in last week's post, that I've been making time to play through some games for a change. I wrote a little about Dear Esther, which heavily inspired our current project. This week, I'd like to write a little more about Never Alone.

I first came across Never Alone on the Extra Credits show, James Recommends. The video provides a good introduction, but in short; the game is half a puzzle platformer and half a documentary film.

It's a lovely story, from a foreign culture, told really tastefully through a game. While the game has a few problems, none of them really bothered me as the experience felt so fresh. Visually, it achieves a lot with very little, particularly the harshness of the environments, which is conveyed simply and beautifully.

While Dear Esther helped inspire our current project, Never Alone revitalized my enthusiasm for making games, because it's a game that really matters. I'd strongly recommend it and I hope 'documentary games' become a thing. One day, I hope I get to help make one.

I also found time for a couple of personal paintings this week, one master study (left) and a landscape study (right). The John Constable study, rapidly turned into a bit of a failure in progress so I abandoned it fairly quickly. The landscape study however went pretty well and I really enjoyed my evening noodling around with it.

I also got to go to London, for a 'Meet the Curators' event at the British Library. I had a great time, but unfortunately I've been quite ill since coming back. I should be better next week though, as team Flaming Dodo gets into the full swing of development. I'm really, really confident in our idea and I'm sure we can execute it effectively.

Week 19, Year 2: Adventures!

This is it. The monster project in the final stretch of my second year at university, is GameCity's, Alice's Adventures Off the Map competition. For the next few months, we are working in teams of 6, to create a game or level, based on Alice's Adventures Underground. My team is called Flaming Dodo Productions and we have our own site where you can follow our progress.

To kick things off, I read the book, as I hadn't read it before. While I enjoyed my afternoon reading, it didn't spark any particularly enticing ideas. We decided from the start that we did not want to create an 'Alice in Wonderland game', so I began to look elsewhere.

In my search for inspiration, I decided to play a couple of games; Never Alone and Dear Esther. While Never Alone completely blew me away, the primary source of inspiration for this project came from Dear Esther.

Containers are everywhere!

Dear Esther is simple and short, yet very engaging. The game is set on a beautiful and serene island, which has an almost eery sense of stillness. While there is a narrator, the majority of the storytelling comes from the environment itself, and that is what I'd like to achieve with this project. An environment that tells the story, of how the idea for Alice's Wonderland crystalized in the mind of Lewis Carroll.

So we had an idea, but to really get things going, we felt we needed to actually go there. So I hired a car and planned a road trip to Oxford.

Christ Church, Oxford.

We were told that we absolutely could not miss the Pitt Rivers museum, so we headed there first and we were not disappointed. It was totally awe inspiring and we all had a fantastic few hours exploring the hundreds of cabinets, containing everything from machine guns to shrunken heads.

A few hours wasn't nearly enough. I'm planning to return though, armed with my Nomad (when it finally arrives) to get a good few days sketching in.

 

But it wasn't all fun and shrunken heads, we did do some work. After lunch, we went and visited Christ Church, where Lewis Carroll worked at the time of writing Alice's Adventures Underground.

Visiting the college, the cathedral and the surrounding area really helped give us a sense of the environment that we are basing our level on and we were able to shoot plenty of reference. It's difficult to know how a place feels without actually going there, particularly when trying to get a sense of scale. After walking the grounds and exploring the area, the British Library images that we have been provided became so much more relatable, which will hopefully really help inform our project.

It was an extremely tiring day, I'm not used to 6AM starts, but it was very enjoyable and a great use of our time. We visited a couple of museums, explored a good deal of Oxford and all in all, it was a successful field trip for team Flaming Dodo!

Dodo in Oxford's, Museum of Natural History.

Week 18, Year 2: Oasis Post-Mortem.

We did it! The project is handed in and completed. First things first, check out the playthrough.

Pretty cool right? We're all immensely proud of it. 4 weeks is a short amount of time and it flew by, I can't believe we're already a month in to 2015. But in 4 weeks, we all feel as though we achieved a whole lot.

We stretched our texture budget to the limit to make this level. We were really keen to hit the cosy atmosphere in our concepts and we knew right from the start that we'd have to make a fair bit of stuff. There are 3 key things, I feel our team did particularly well:

• We didn't scope too large. I'd not heard of this term until a week ago, but something we did almost intuitively, right from the start, was reduce our idea to a minimal viable product. Or at least the 'minimal hand-in-able product'. Then we added stretch goals as the project progressed.
• We didn't waste time and stuck to our schedule. I make a lot of schedules, but rarely do I stick to them, because they're either unrealistic or I take deadlines too lightly. But not this time.
• We communicated well. Through-out the project, communication between team members was excellent. Most importantly, during the crucial early stages, we were all working together on site to arrive at a unified project idea.

No project is perfect however, and this project was no exception. Fortunately, as we initially scoped small, this is mostly a list of things we would have liked to have added, rather than a list of things we wish we hadn't done. And hopefully we will have time to go back and add those things in the future.

Of course, there is also the list of things that remain a bit broken; such as the arbitrarily teleporting doors and the landscape shading issues.

And don't even get me started on light maps.

I'm nit-picking though, overall this project was a great experience. Every member of the team was a pleasure to work with, and I'm full of optimism moving forward. 

This was a fantastic project and I took a lot from it. The task was exciting and an excellent exercise to prepare us for the monster project that's up next...but more on that next week.

Week 17, Year 2: I can barely contain my excitement...

I am exceedingly pleased. Cheerful even, this week's been great! Everything has come together spectacularly well. The teams work has been top notch, the level looks stunning and we're all extremely proud of it.

That said, there is no shortage of work left to be done before we call it finished. It's mostly polish, but we also want to dial up the 'lived-in-ness'. Pipes, air conditioning vents...that sort of thing. It feels great to have a bit of time left, for once, to add details, and make the project look really finished.

Speaking of which, I spent a day mixing together some sounds for the level. I've never really done any audio editing but it was a fun day and I really enjoyed it. It needs to be a bit more subtle, classic audio newb mistake I guess. But even so, it adds a vast amount to the play experience and I'll definitely be adding sound wherever possible in future projects.

As you can see from our level, I also finished and assembled the containers I was creating last week. I spent a long time on these, possibly too long, but they turned out great and I learned so much making them. And not just about how amazing they are, I'll go into it more in next week's post-mortem.

The one negative thing about this week, is no personal work. I think crunch weeks are going to have to be an exception though. I worked like a machine through the weekend, and all I had energy for was a few late night games of Forza to chill out.

Bernese Alps in Forza 5. So pretty! 

I'm OK with it though, I'm so pleased with this project I'm actually excited to present it next week.

But I reckon we've earned at least one day off, and tomorrow that's exactly what we're doing. We're heading to London for the VFX Festival. I've never been before and I'm really looking forward to our day out! A change of scene is just what's needed, before we plunge back in to the last few days of Container City.

Week 16, Year 2: Cracking on with Container City.

Another week has flown by and we've been making steady progress on our Container City. Everyone in the team is working really hard and despite what you may think after seeing last week's picture, spirits are high.

On Thursday we gave a short presentation to our tutors, to review our progress and discuss how we intend to move forward. It went really well! The feedback we received was very positive and it was a big relief to get the go ahead before fully committing ourselves to our 'Oasis' level.

Oasis, work in progress.

We also received some useful suggestions, which were promptly added to the to-do list. Mostly minor changes, but the most significant improvement suggested, was adding a vista and background elements. Currently the level does feel quite isolated, so this is definitely a high priority.

On another positive note, I found some time for personal work this week! It's masquerading as course work but its part of a tutorial I'm working through. I'm really pleased with it and I'm happy I got to do some painting this week.

And it's not the only painting I did. Prior to Thursday's presentation, I was working on some alternative themes to fall back on, should our primary idea get canned. Fortunately, they weren't needed, but I finished them off anyway for a bit of fun and practice.

Container City, alternative themes.

But the majority of my working hours this week, have been spent modelling and unwrapping the 'master container'. These 25 unique components will make up the various containers and container parts that make up Oasis.

Exploded container components.

This week has felt steadily productive and I'm particularly pleased that I managed to make time for some personal work. Next week is the final post before the deadline, but I'm hoping I still make time for painting. As long as nothing goes horribly wrong *fingers crossed*, I'm certain I will.