Week summary

This week our first lecture was based on design roles within the industry. Just some of the roles that we looked at in the lecture was Technical designers, Level designers just being some. The lecture interested me a lot as it gave me a better understanding of what is involved within these areas of the industry. The structure of how a level is built was also shown from grey-boxing/white-boxing before an artist creates the design on top.

We also had a Z brush lecture in the week which I enjoyed a lot. We were shown the basics again with the programme but it really helped refreshed my mind on how to use the programme again, I was able to get right back into it after a hour.

Later in the week we had a contextual studies lecture that was focused on mazes inside some video games, these being unicursal mazes (only one path leading to the exist) and multicursal mazes (More than one way to exist). I will be looking into some games that use these two maze types.

I also had a seminar this week, this is the first seminar that I have experienced. It was nice as we as a group spoke about our views on the task that was set about the importance of visuals within a game by an author. It was good to hear about what others thought of the text and the authors thoughts.

We had our first anatomy lecture this week also, it was very interesting to see how the bones and muscles are structured, I learnt a few things that I believe will help me with my figure drawing. The lecture covered the understandings of how the body moves and how it's bones and muscles work during movements and poses.

The end of the week we had a workshop on UE4 looking at blueprints and how they work so a character or object can move or be effected inside the game. During this lecture we looked at first person mode and how to set up a basic character and it's movements using blueprints and then being able to control it within game mode. I found this to be a little overwhelming as I found there was a lot to take in, I found it hard to keep up. I hope that it will come easier to me the more that I learn this.

 Blueprint - Showing character movement.

Very basic character that was used for movements.

 Game progress

Also this week I started to use UE4 to start making my game. After some thought I decided to go with the murder mystery thriller game. I have started to build up my level with the basics, at the moment this includes setting up a character with movement using the WASD keys, space bar to jump and I have played around with adding a downloaded model (Crowbar) to add into my game. I looked at some Youtube tutorials on how to add decals in my game, this is where you can add images or textures to objects. I wanted to add blood on the floor and walls etc... so this was very useful, after watching the video and giving it ago I now know how to add decal to my game.

 This image shows the crowbar asset that I downloaded and added to my game.

Here is the crowbar and the blood markings (Decals) that I added to my game. Only one problem I could not figure out with the blood decal is that on the video the decal was more variant where in my game it is not so much, but I think it still works well.

This is my movement blueprints, this makes the first person character move with the WASD keys and space bar to jump as well as using the mouse to look around.