Blackout Update : Ranged Enemies and Player Death!

As said for my targets tonight, ranged enemies and player death:

Using an old tutorial found here, I was able to produce the following :

Using the blueprint already in place for the player I was able to make the enemy spawn a projectile.

Using the tutorial I found here, I was able to make the player take damage and restart the level when their health reached 0.

The projectile applying damage

The player taking damage

Dungeon Crawler Research - Part 1

Here is an extract taken from a book by Chris Crawford called 'Chris Crawford on Games Design'.

These points relate to our project in the following ways:

• Dungeon Crawler : In our game the player will have to fight a large amount of enemies in a large underground cave system, similar to that of a dungeon.
• RolePlaying : The player will be able to acquire items and bonuses to upgrade their player or weapons, to allow them to kill harder enemies later in the game.
• Shooter : Our game involves a lot of shooting stuff.

Playtesting: Session 1 - First Build

After Dan had created the initial gameplay steps within Unreal 4 engine by adding beginnings of the games dodge strafe mechanic and ai charge mechanic we gathered a few individuals from the other teams including ours to get some feedback on the games current state, we had mostly positive feedback regarding the strafe dodge and decided on having some of the guns having an 'instant kill' due to the play testing having no actual feedback or health bars. We now know what direction we're going in with the strafe dodge and we've decided on a potential change in the dodges velocity and distance to keep the fast paced gameplay up to tempo, here are some play test pictures:

Colour Theory/Colour Schemes

After discussion with the team about what images of the mood board they liked and why ,we came up with the 4 main colours in our minds that our game was going to include for colour scheme. The following colours the group picked and talked about were: Green- which would mostly be for any foliage that would be used, Brown- for any of the rock formations etc , Purple-for the blood of the enemies and following that Orange for possible lights on the weapons that were going to be used in the game. While I originally tried using Adobe Kuler to create my own colour palettes the results were not turning out nearly as I would've liked so instead I took the main 5 images from the inspiration/mood board that the group had spoke about and used Kuler to come up with 5 possible colour palettes that we can have a look at to see if any of them are what we are going for in our game.

Brown:-

Purple:-

Green:-

Orange:-

Green:-

 

Revamped Alien Moodboards

https://www.pinterest.com/yuutarohiroshio/alien-hunter/

https://www.pinterest.com/yuutarohiroshio/alien-ranger/

Reworked both the boards some. For the record, I only chose the bipedal references for their general aesthetic more than their structure. digit-grade legs seem to be the way to go to help increase travelling distance for predators and for pouncing. Acid is also the most common projectile within aliens, and animals have been known to carry poison safely within their system with toxic sacs wherever they need to be dispersed, so that would be the best bet in terms of ranged offence.

Additional reference that couldn't be obtained on Pinterest for the ranged attacker:
http://www.metroid-database.com/bestiary/bestiary.php?b=158

Blackout Basic AI + Improved Boost For Playtest

So I've added AI and some sound effects to the current project! I've also improved the dash boost thanks to help from Julian.

Gameplay video here:

Sound implementation tutorial here:

AI tutorial used here:

Handgun Secondary Referencing - Moodboard

Here are some images of existing sci-fi handgun concepts that we took inspiration on with our sci-fi handgun, we wanted something bulky and seemingly heavy duty but then can visually be upgraded into an smg, we plan to explore the different ways in which we can take our silhouettes and developed designs with a bulky build, we also plan to incorporate pixel textures and coloured lights representing the type of ammo used for the gun:

Menu Layout Ideas

During our run through of the games design document, we decided to chuck together some quick designs of how the menu could possibly look as a pixel styled arcade shooter, we looked at many existing primary and secondary references, we looked at how the Star Wars intro text skewed and applied similar techniques to our menu idea, we also added a pixel mosaic styled filter to give as an idea of what the pixel art style would look like:

Aarans Design Thumbnail

Dans Design Thumbnail

Alien creature moodboard

https://www.pinterest.com/yuutarohiroshio/alien-creature-ideas/

Progress on the moodboard so far. Decided to look into burrowing animals/insects for inspiration, considering the possibility that they could have created lairs within the caves already. Carnifex in there for multi-arm idea; two for burrowing, two for offense. Ranged aliens would most likely revolve around spitting and/or lobbing objects and blending in to the caves, offensive would just be rushdown. Most suitable appearance might be reptilian or insectoid, though that could be up for debate.

Character Dash Update

My targets were to begin researching Oculus Rift compatibility with Unreal engine, select our engine to be used and to also begin prototyping the character's movement in the engine selected.

1) After researching online and seeing video tutorials of Oculus Rift being used in Unreal, we have decided to use it as our main engine, this is also good because the team have experience in using Unreal Engine.

A video of Oculus Rift implementation can be shown here: 

2) My other task was to begin prototyping the character's movement in Unreal. Using the FPS template I was able to tweak the already made variables to get the player running faster and jumping higher. The next step was to create the dash mechanic, where boosters would launch our player in the direction they were moving.

To do this I needed to find out how to apply force to our player on a key press. I was able to find a forum post explaining how to do this:

With this in place, force would be applied to the player when they press the 'left shift' key. However this would apply force in all directions and the player would fly out of the map. After further research I was able to find another forum post demonstrating how to apply force in the direction that the object is already moving in. Using both images I was able to combine them:

With this done the player could now dash in whichever direction they were moving. However the player was able to spam this ability to fly and move incredibly fast. After browsing the forums I was able to find a person who had posted an image online demonstrating how they created ability cooldowns:

Using this image I was able to implement it into the code that I had already created:

Below is a video demonstrating the movement, jumping, shooting and dashing working. If you pay attention to the top left of the video, you can see that when I press the dash key, it prints on the screen that were dashing. If I press it while it's on cooldown, you can see that it prints that the ability is on cooldown:

Environment-Mood/Inspiration board

Here is the Environment Moodboard that I created using Pinterest.On this board are different pins of Sci-fi tunnels and caves showing along the lines of what im thinking , that it wont be all enclosed but have  areas for light to come through as well as bigger spaces for  maybe overhanging pathways and other areas for possible creatures to come out of etc.Some of the images found  are along the colors we discussed in university the oranges and purples,those sorts of colors while others are more generic images.I know that these are just a starting point and am sure throughout the projects development this board will be added to and talked about/developed more in detail.




https://www.pinterest.com/alwynrjones/sci-fi-tunnels-and-caves-inspirationreference-mood/

Meeting Summary. 15:53 28/09/15

In todays meeting we discussed the existing game design document with the group in order to make final decisions and refine what Dan had already written, here is a list of some of the stuff we discussed. This will later be developed into the games content list which will branch off to include how many assets will need to be modelled and how many concept pieces need to be finished and so on:

Content List - Information

Blackout (Project Black)

Genre: Sci-Fi

Story Bio/Game Information:

‘3D Pixel-esque’ fast paced first person shooter with potentially procedurally generated dungeons (dungeon crawler) with boss every 5-10 rooms. ‘Fun Gore’.

Inspiration:

Age of Zombies

Binding of Isaac

Strafe

Doom

Time Splitters: Future Perfect

Quake 3

Unreal Tournament

Physical abilities/Weapon power-ups (Perks):

 5 Physical abilities: (Only have 2 physical abilities)

Double Jump

Blink (Teleport)

Assault Drone (Passive)

Grenade

Plasma Sword (Melee)

2 Non-Special weapon power-ups: (Keep weapon power-ups):

Explosive rounds

Corrosive rounds

6 Weapon types (Random spawns):

Starting/Light:

Handgun > Sub-Machine Gun (Upgrade)

Shotgun

Heavy:

Crossbow > Railgun

Special:

Gatling Gun (Special Weapon)

Rocket Launcher (Special Weapon)

4 Characters:

 1x Hands

1x Boss

2x Creatures (Purple/Green blood)

World Assets (Interior Tunnel System):

Initial Level Flow:

Tutorial > Rooms > Upgrade Station (Optional) > Boss > Rooms > Upgrade Station (Optional) > Boss etc…

Boss Rewards (Choice):

 Health replenishment

Extra points

Stat boosts

Random ability (Rare)

Random weapon (Rare)

Menu and UI Information: 

UI Colours: Grey, Orange, And Purple

Pixel Fonts: (Dafont source) –

Game Modes/Interface: 

Story Mode

Boss Mode

Possible wave survival mode

Title/Press Start >

Story Mode >

New Game

Boss Survival

Options >

Controls

Video

Audio

Quit

Music: 

Electronic Music - Sci-Fi Relevant

Potential Artists:

Areas:

Testing Facility – Tutorial Area

Alien Tunnels 1

Alien Tunnels 2

Alien Tunnels 3

Alien Tunnels 4

Alien Tunnels 5

Alien Boss Arena

Platforms & Control Interface:

Main Platform – PC

Other Platforms - Xbox One/Playstation 4

Moodboards:

 Moodboard for each weapon

Moodboard for inspiration

Moodboard for each asset

Moodboard for environment

Moodboard for creatures