Pre-Production

14^th September

The begin this unit, me and Emma came up with general ideas for the game, we came up with the idea of creating a character introduction short. The idea came from Bastion's short from Blizzard's Overwatch, in this short you see Bastion in a forest surrounded by plants and animals. The main thing I personally liked from this short was the weather effects, the overall image of the forest and how calm and peaceful everything seems. We later came up with the idea of creating a shocking genre twisting short that started off with this calm forest but turned darker into more of a thriller horror game.

These are some of the videos we liked the look of and wanted to somehow cooperate into the game. We liked the idea of a big chase scene so we watched videos from Spirited Away, Inside and Little Nightmares and came up with the idea of the character running into the forest chasing something and meeting danger where they will outrun it.

The character idea came from Coraline, Little Nightmares and Louise from Bob's Burgers, we want a little girl as our lead but wanted her to have a creepy aspect to her, leading us to incorporate a gas mask to her look inspired by Psycho Mantis from the Metal Gear Solid series. We came up with the idea that she would chase a bunny into the forest, lose track of time and eventually come into danger which is what inspired us to create the 'fog'. This fog came from the TV show The 100 and also The Hunger Games were at a certain time a poisonous fog envelopes the forest and destroys any life.

This moodboard is something we created with the environment and mood in mind, we added creepy games that had little kids as the main characters and also brighter games to show how we want the forest to look before the horror parts of the cutscene begins happening.

Quick Time Events

Originally after our second sequence we were going to have a choice of either a combat route or and obstacle based QTE scene but we scrapped the combat section as we felt it just didn’t fit with the design of the game. From here I went ahead and started the creation of the first 2 QTE we did it this way as my strengths lie in the blueprinting and programming side so that’s way I could get the first ones done and working and then that way while Emma is doing the final one then I can help and instruct to help with time constraints. From here the blueprinting was rather simple as ith was just a slightly more complicated widget system that called event that I would place inside the sequencer at key points allows for prompts on screen.

Once this blueprint was finished it was just a case of animating the character in the sequencer this was easy since we had already did this a lot throughout this project and so we had become well versed in its use,

We had to make 2 sequences for each QTE so that we could have a good and bad End this allowed for the whole section to be in a loop so it restarted if you failed until you completed it

Sequence 2

For this sequence we had a bit of a role reversal with Emma creating the Sequence while gave assistance and help to make sure everything was going smoothly also since I had already made the first one I could give help to save time from personal experience and make sure nothing would collide in the blueprints hindering the creation.

This sequence we tried to keep extremely close to the concept art and story board since it is our big moment to introduce a driving force that leads the character to the end of the level. We realised part way through creation that we would need a mist or fog particle effect so I went to create it while Emma continued with the sequence creation.

The particle was created by simply spawning in many flat disc shapes which where overlapped to give a sort of spinning effect this was not going to be a finished version of the particle just created to give an idea of how the FMP would look, I even gave it the iconic purple colour from the concept art and story boards just to help people viewing this to imagine the final version.

Gameplay

With the first sequence completed, we then went on to the creation of gameplay this wasn’t going to be a huge section for us since in the planning phase we wanted to just get a more visual scene rather than high gameplay and action this meant we had a bit of a problem we had to make the player get from sequence 1 to 2 while still keeping them interested. For this both I and Emma decided that the player should be chasing the rabbit from our concept art this was going to go in a sequence but we believed this would be much better use for it. For this I simply placed Emma’s rabbit concept art onto a block to give a representation of the rabbit then began to animate the box using a matinee sequence to hop down the level once the character approaches. This gave a good feel for what we were going for in our story boards and concept art.

From this we had another problem it was too boring to just chase a rabbit for 3 seconds down and empty level so Emma came up with an idea In a meeting we had to address this issue and that was to create a series of obstacle that you must travers but the rabbit con traverse easier due to its size, this mean the play couldn’t catch up to the rabbit to quick and also made the game more fun.

To go with this idea we needed prompts to tell the player what to do, almost like a mini tutorial to instruct and direct the players for this we needed blueprints set up with widgets that would open at set points and tell the character inputs to use for the character blueprint, this was a really good idea since this trick is used in the industry a lot and has become a staple which will not soon disappear.

Project Set Up

Since this unit runs alongside Unit 3 I spoke to Emma and we made a team decision to set the project up ready for the creation of cutscenes once more of the planning and storyboard process has been completed in unit 3. This decision was made since it will help to have visual plans while creating the cut scene’s and quick time events later in the unit.

The first steps we decided to work on was the character blueprint and movement, we did this to start work on the gameplay sections which will be present between our cutscenes as we had planned.

I started this by creating a character blueprint using the third person blueprint as a starting point from here the main focus was improving on movement to get a much more realistic and believable move set, to do this I planned to make a locomotion set which will blend animations so that no matter what direction the player move’s in, the transition is as smooth as possible. As well as this I wanted to also programme the character to be able to get up off the ground after rag dolling. While I began to set the blueprint up I asked Emma to work on making the animations blends I would need for the locomotion set and then placed the task onto our agile scrum sheet with a time frame for it to be completed. 

Sequence 1

We had created a functioning character blueprint as the first stepping stone for our prototype. Next on the list is the first sequence, after doing some research on the sequencer in ue4 I learnt that there is multiple approaches to getting your character animated inside of the sequencer, you can either hand animate the character in the cut scene adding different animations when needed. This is a good approach which allows for a lot of editing so if something doesn’t look right it can be easily changed but it requires extra work to try and match animations to movement and sometimes gives some clunky results. 

The other method to use in the sequencer is to play the game itself and record all the data of your character movement, this is especially good at giving you clean results and natural looking movement, the only downside of this is needing to have a fully functioning character blue print and also if you want to make changes to movement you have to record a full scene over again. Arguably this isn’t the most optimal way to get this done but allowed for smoother animations which would of took longer to smooth out.