Senior Production
Post V
I don’t have much to show for visuals this week, just some text so feel free to just read the TL;DR if it isn’t interesting. I also don’t have too much to talk about this week. I spent a large portion of my time working on a few other projects and so there just isn’t much to say. However, some research has been done and the good news is that my team did in fact pass the Stage 1 Challenge I talked about last week.
The research and discussion has been focused around a few important topics for our game. When we passed the first stage, we were posed a question which we were not really capable of answering. This question being “What is your gameplay?”. Sure, we had some ideas for mechanics and we had created an atmosphere for our game in our previous prototype but what was the point of it all? Seeing as the point of this stage is to do a “Deep Dive” and the research will more than definitely help us, we’ve begun exploring what are game can and will be. One of the important things we want to use is a story. This can be a powerful tool to help drive the game and as a means to keep the player playing down the road as the game progresses. But a story isn’t enough, we need gameplay. So we decided to see how the mechanics we’ve talked about can be integrated into the story and become part of the game. This means the end result is that our game is more than a survival game with horror elements. Maybe it is too soon to tell, but It is helping.
As a team, we also began researching various psychological topics and other subjects useful to our game. We even watched a horror movie which had a similar premise to our story. Turns out the movie was terrible for more reasons than i’d care to say (Go see its wikipedia page here) but we did learn a few things. One of the things the movie did terribly besides the way they told their story was their inconsistency. They constantly did things that didn’t make sense in the context of their story. They also left too many questions un-answered and while in some cases, having un-answered questions is a good thing, this was quite awful. The list goes on, but the point being is that we can learn from their mistakes. To put it simply, don’t do what they did because clearly it wasn’t successful.
Lastly, I spent a small amount of time researching lighting in Unreal Engine 4. Having no experience with the lighting in the engine and since the prototype was created by our artist and designer, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was told that stationary lights were limited in quantity due to how the light maps are baked but it turns out this is wrong. In a short amount of time I was able to figure out how to solve our problem and now its just a matter of making some minor tweaks to the level to fix the lighting. Nothing particularly special in the end, but seeing as lighting is important to the game, it was an important thing to look into.
This concludes this weeks post. This was a slow week on the production front, but it is very likely this coming week will be more eventful in one way or another.
TL;DR
- What is our gameplay?
- Working on story
- Integrating mechanics into story
- Maybe redefining the game?
- Watch a bad movie
- Learned what not to do
- Found solution to current lighting problem