I don't want to go in any detail as it was gruesome. I'll just say, nothing Covid related! Anyway I was literally stuck in bed for a whole weak. I still tried to work but I couldn't go as far as I wanted. Didn't open the project. Just added the new team member to the project and shared all my work file with them. But that was it. Still I did a lot of thinking, especially since I had someone to talk to and dive deep inside my project and there were some unanswered question I had to deal with. And I answered the most important one of them all. New document - VisualFirst thing I did is I created a visual research document. I already had all that in mind but in order to convey an idea about what the game is going to be, I have to make clear and precise examples. I love video game above else but I also love cinema, especially animation. Luckily I have now a beta account to SHOTDECK which allows me to take good screenshots of movie shots to convey my visual ideas for the game. You also can check my visual document here as it gets updated and I'll share a few screens if you don't have the patience. Here you can see that direct movie comparaison can shine what Paris looks like compared to, even if retro, a US city Here you can see a direct comparaison of urban poly games that have a good look but not specifically suited for my game. A good balance would be an in-between those two pictures as a game style. So as you can see. Even in my state, work has been done but it's not super impressive if I may say so hahaha. Still I'm glad I was able to do something at least. I figured out the combatFor a long time, I knew the game was going to be about someone that fights, and struggle. And I had to have game mechanics around that but I didn't want them to be secondary to the story. It's a game. Gameplay should be a center part to the narrative and the narrative a center part to the gameplay. Not two separated entities. I know the main character first choice is non lethal combat. And I loved some ways of fighting in some games that seemed powerful while not killing the enemy. Its then I realized unique games that were openworld or somewhat openworld where I loved the feel and gameplay behind fighting. For the feel, someone that I know a lot of people love deerly. Tifa feels very powerful with just fist and kicks. She can kill with them, but she can also powerfully knock out enemies with that. And I want the player to feel as powerful as Tifa when playing my game. If you didn't know, Dead Island has a unique combat control system that has a very heavy impact in the gameplay. The analogue mode allow you to lock on an enemy and swing your right joystick in any direction in order to aim at limbs or push an enemy towards a certain direction. ITS AMAZING. You can break specific arms in order to prevent them from fighting and in this video we can see the player just launching zombies overboard by specifically swimming from right to left. It's unique, it uses dynamically the environment as well as interact a lot with a simple zombie enemy, it brings a lot of variety and I want that to be center in my game. Top down will allow to project on top of the verticality our enemies in a number of ways. And believe me, I'll make that awesome. Finally, a game that uses a lot of melee fighting, and in first person, is an early Arkane title (that is amazing, play it if you didn't) that is called Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Arkane used the source engine, that was made by valve and used in every game they made, because of its heavy physic oriented design. They used the engine not only for puzzle but in fights as well. The fighting is still pretty simple but the level design makes up for that. It even makes it super good with traps, empty space and all that kind of juicy things to use during enemy encounter to use the environment as a weapon. If I can mix all that in my top down that uses verticality... I will be able to make a game with unique fighting style that will allow for very good gameplay on top of a game with, I hope, a good narrative. I also want to use these logs for something elseI never talked about it, but I also wanted these logs to share more than just me working on a project. I wanted to share a little bit of myself. So if I get the time and I heal, I will also sometimes post about two things I really want to express.
The thing is, right now it feels a bit pointless as (it's not bad in any way) these logs don't have a big audience and so my thoughts will be for myself only. And what I'd really want when sharing an opinion is to have someone with a different opinion. So we can share arguments about why and elevate both our opinions and construct them better, improve them. Anyway. I have always some insight that needs someone to contradict them, especially towards gaming and game experiences. Recently I've played a bunch of ps4 exclusives that happens to be HUGE OPEN WORLDS WITH PLAY TIME SUPER LONG, and while I have nothing against the gendra, I have some criticism that I'd like to state. Like why most of them can't handle an ending that feels complete narrative and gameplay wise? It has to have something to do with how much you stretch both of them for such a long experience but some studios like Rockstar manage to make their ending super good so... Anyway I'd like to do entire articles about that. Also I'd like to share stuff I love, like movies or taking screenshots of games.
0 Comments
Hello! During this beginning of personal project week, there is some news that I want to share. As I became pretty sick I'm not really sure on my progress but I think it is still worth updating this log book. So let's dive in and see how things are going. Doing everything solo makes for a slow startAs usual, you always think you're too efficient for the time you take to do things. When I first ascertained the time it would take me to do everything pre production on every side of work. Well I HIGHLY UNDERESTIMATED how much time it would take for everything outside of programmation to be actually ready. A lot of thing changed, for the better but so far:
But it's fine because Pre-production is a phase to figure things out, and so me figuring things out is actually a good thing. I'm working a lot and learning way more than I could ever have imagined super fast. And for that, I become a better versatile dev. And everything is not bad I took a lot of reference picturesAnd I'm happy to say... they are pretty revealing. I always thought Paris had something special and just taking a picture of the street while I live here makes me realize how much Paris has little small things that is everywhere that other cities don't. Like really pour tag art and very beautiful tag art. Pigeons. Ground textures, symmetry, curved roads, tree cages... There's a lot of small details. It was RAINING THAT DAY so I had to take pictures quickly and couldn't take more. BUT STILL, it's pretty good and pretty revealing. Someone joined the fightSo since this is a passion project with no gain at the end except experience. Even though I made the project ready for a team of person to work on. I actually didn't think anyone would join. But I pitched a project to someone from my school and they agreed to help me out a bit! They're interested and joined the hack'n'plan as well as the git. They're pretty good at coding so I can't wait to see their impact on the project. They just heard the pitch yesterday so we won't see anything from that side in the coming days but eventually. There's also no string attached. So they're involvement is their own to choose. And I'm very ok with that. This means this week, I will have to focus on making documentation to convey ideas in an easier fashion for other party members. As now, the solo project is less solo after all. Also school. Did some stuff I like.I'm working on very low level programming. Assembly language! I coded an absolute function with masking bits and doing shifts. Here's a gif on how that works. I hope to share some more of that as well as doing a little check up on my progress at the end of this week. But I'm afraid not a lot of coding or visual is going to happen. But everything progress all the time. And that's a good direction to go.
Hello everyone! A god damn lot happened this week. I did learn a lot. I did work a lot. And I'm way more efficient these days. I can't work on this everyday but what I do I'm proud of and things are going faster every week. Also as a reminder, as a one man project... Everything takes long because all the time I spend on hack'n'plan, on programming, on levels, on shaders prevent me from coding and advancing. I'm also reading a lot to iterate and try to do the project as best as I can Here's an update on my kanban organizationI also updated the tags Not going to show it as well but I changed my folder organization as well. No more 2DI wanted to do pixel arts for this project, like the two first GTAs or Darkwoods that are heavy influences on this project. But I can't do that. Well I could but it would be a lot of time going into animating sprites. The reason is simple... It's really hard to produce diversity with spritesThe only way to easily do diversity with sprites is to change the color palette, this way you don't have to draw new animations and still have the same results. That being said. It is way easier to make diversity in 3D. You can change the texture completely which would be the equivalent, but you can also easily add props and accessories to the character model and you can even change the character model... All of that you can do in 3D with one added benefit : you can use the same animation on several models. It means I had to completely rework my architectureThe first reason I worked in a certain way with a pawn and I created and added a bunch of component to a pawn which is the base class you can work with in order to control a character was because I didn't nude a skeletal mesh. It was also to learn to somewhat redo my character and interact with the engine's physic. But this custom pawn lost its interest when I stopped doing 2D and so, it would save me a lot of work to actually go through a character instead of a custom pawn. At first I thought it was too bad because I made a lot of progress on my pawn. Lots of controlAs you can see I'm getting closer of the top down controls I wanted to do with permanent aim sight. The cursor has a weird bug that I'm explaining there, but in its current state, it won't have any impact on the game at all. Also all of these movements can be overridden, and so if I control... Anything, as long as it was a children from that pawn. It would work. The controller will stay forever as this is a single player game but the pawn might change depending on narration, mini games or anything else really. So this was a lot of work to do these simple feats. Because of all that, erasing my work felt wrong... But I did a pretty good job. Before changing the code and moving it to my character. I saved all my progress into my source control to retrieve my work if everything goes bad and... In like... 2 hours. I managed to take all my code changed it, change my references and it worked instantly. I made more documentationSpecifically, about music. I really want for my idea to not change with time and shape my project and have clear place where I save my ideas and I can convey them. Since,,, Why not you can check it out there. If it get's updated you will see it. I really need to work on a more presentable game design document, not a google doc but an actual power point with mock ups and images, or at least references to easily grasp the project. I also documented myself a lot, downloaded Blender and Quixel Mixer, I read a lot about how the engine function exactly and try to really ready myself to master Unreal Engine 4. Also I had a light issue and I wanted to fix it so badYou have no idea. Sometimes the smallest things gets on my mind and I want to fix it so much that I don't do what I'm supposed to do. And this gets encouraged because I work alone. If I want to fix the light I'll do it and I'll spend my life and search everywhere to find hints. Or try everything in the engine and editor until eventualy it is fixed. In order for you to grasp the situation. I'm not going to say the "problem"... Here's a screen of it. Contact me or comment if you find it. I spent a whole afternoon to "fix" this issue City of love work summary as patch notesFinally if you want to precisely know my work... You can check it out bellow as I post every patch notes I made on my git. Here it is ! MondayI actually applied to various studios to see if they'd be open to work with me outside of my school days. I hope I'll get some work but I'm not ultra invested right now. It will be fine as long as I find work before septembre 2021. Tuesday/WednesdayI didn't push my work Tuesday so both days merged... -Added a lot of metadatas and specifiers -Linked the pawn to the controller on possess -Made all the axis and actions functions -Bound horizontal and vertical functions to the controls -Tested it out it works -Create a new physic material -Binded all keys to the controller ( I should make some menu functions inside the controller directly ) -Made movement functions -Made jump functions -Made a simple player state enumerator (not using it currently but will have to) -You can jump infinitly as a result -Made a new Blueprint because the c++ update bugged the last one -Didn't get rid of the last one -Made the capsule collider component the root component -Using it to compute movements -Quickly changed the jump formula to bring it closer to the UE4 metric system ThirsdayThe "light problem" day, also the day I did my aiming code -Added a function to get the velocity in the player pawn -Made a function in the tick of the controller to get inworld cursor position -Cleaned a bunch of comment and useless code -Forgot to put the UFUNCTION macro above the getter -Fixed some shadows and lights Friday (day of writing this post)Lot happened today, good day of work gents! -Can move through Character -Can jump through Character -Camera is still doing its camera stuff -I learned a lot about Unreal Game Framework -My gitignore didn't ignore right because of it's location. Fixed it... I'm stupid -Made a blueprint for the character -Added a mesh -Cleaning starts -Pawn was deleted -InputComponent was deleted -CapsuleComponent was deleted -SkeletalMesh component was deleted -Map was tested Final huge news: Amplifying Voices!So my school was chosen amongst many to send students to work with other students from the US as well as Canada. The goal is to talk about inclusion, diversity and do a small Unity project about that. I've sent an application because it was a week where I didn't have school in case of, sent a color letter about my intentions and my background and heck. They selected me. From all the students of Isart Digital that did an application, mine was held. So I signed a thing and now, I'm apart of the thing. Unless something very bad happened like a mistake. You guys have no idea how pumped I am. I hope I'll make a beautiful game with beautiful people! That's it!If anyone is reading, thanks for that. That is the kind of investment I do not understand. Stay strong, stay loved, and see you guys next time o/
|
LukasInterest in video games since forever and till I'll die Archives
April 2021
Categories
All
|