Eval

The task we were given is to use our skills from last year to make a small game to refresh our memories in the mood for our main priority. We were able to be in groups of 2 to 3 so naturally I partnered up with good friend Isiah who i worked with the whole of last year and I work to a good degree with. I knew when going into this project that i wanted to push myself to do something challenging and I wasn't sure what exactly that was in particular.

Communicating with Isiah about the work was fairly simple due to us always being in contact with each other online and in college. The idea was to make a Zombie survival game with waves of NPC's and some sort of magic involved. How ever there were complications with the video i was watching as it wasn't fully completed nor did it look like it would be finished as the YouTuber stopped the project 2 years ago but still post other types of content no so we had to figure what to do with our game. I was on the side of coding the game texturing it and so on while Isiah was modelling and it became apparent to me that the work was going to be too much for me to do on my own so i asked Isiah to help out with the coding side also which didn't happen. I feel like we could of talked over and planned out this game a lot more then we did and had a rough idea of what we was doing. We had multiple conversations with Jez and Owain how ever i believe we could of gotten into more detail rather then just coming round and asking hows things are going, I notice other people were getting into conversations and able to talk to Jez about thee problems and I wish I was able to also have a bit more time with Jez to go over some problems we were having with our game.

We poorly kept to a time schedule as we were fully convinced about the idea we originally had so we didn't make a timetable in the end which I believe held us back just a bit as we didn't have a clear goal or time frame to strive towards so there was no motivation to get things done. It was merely a case of what do we think needs adding, create the model add it in and asses if it looks good or not. This "strategy" and not real structure to getting things done we added bears, some objects and a ramp to our game just because we could. If i can redo one major aspect to our game it would be setting time goals and a schedule just to push a bit of motivation from the two of us to get things done.

 My research went pretty well for our first idea as I got multiple pictures and made a mood board packed full of zombie related ideas that could help us with setting the scenery of the game and the feel. I also did a bit of research on weapon designs for the game too as I was thinking about adding guns into the game such as the Thompson and Trench gun which were classic guns back in CoD World at War but also thought about how I could redesign the guns too to make them look more unique like adding stone textures or futuristic texture to make it look like it not from this world. It didn't go too well due to plan changes and all the research i did was null. I will definitely sit down and figure a fixed idea before going a head with work and research allows me to gather more information and more useful research and pictures to increase production speed.

I encountered multiple complications going into this project as I had to do a lot of coding which I hadn't done previously besides simple animations. My first problem was when I went into making the zombie waves system as the video I was following to make a CoD Zombie remake when through different steps to make different aspect of the game but was never completed so it never showed me how to make the wave system or weapon system, it had the movement locked down and the player health but i did manage to be able to use the zombie AI chase mechanic at least which i applied to a basic looking bear model into my game. Now i got the "zombie" i had to figure out how to kill it, this was the biggest struggle out of everything as there was absolutely no video on YouTube and no forum online I could find that teaches you how to make a shooting mechanic in unreal that shoots one "bullet" let alone multiple to imitate a machine-gun. This was an annoyance but after looking I settled with a shooting mechanic that wasn't exactly the best but it shoots so I didn't care, i thought  i could modify it later but that was impossible due to the way it was designed. However it shot a bullet so i didn't complain it also went onto talk about making a health system, I tried to follow but it had multiple custom codes with no access to it them so i had to get Jez over to help me out using his way of making collisions with the bear and missile which was bugged as the missile had to be a solid object to do damage which meant when it collided it would hit the bear about 6 times.

In conclusion this project though it be 6 weeks taught me a lot about having a clear focus on a project instead of winging it. I have had a long conversation with Isiah about our next project and said we need to plan things out more and get a schedule going to make sure we finally complete a game I can be happy with. I will also be looking into planning out the game as id rather of had these 6 weeks to plan out my game on paper first before making it.

the factory

this is the size of the map we are using, ive made it so that it isnt too big and it inst too small and theirs no unnecessary poly that could potentially kill your frame rates.

This is the little ware house where the factory stores all of its teddy bear components. I used a light fog to make the walls and corners seem a bit better then what they are and it kinda of distracts you from the terrible texturing.

This rooms is the machinery room, the room consists of just machines and a ramp up to another floor that i didn't get around to doing, it was supposed to be a sort of command room that monitors the machines and workers but didn't get around to doing it. the stripes on the floor are added by using small planks in the air for the roofing as kind of like sky lines and it gave it a nice effect specially when being chased by bears

Lose health

This is the piece of code used for hitting the bar and taking their health down, the first part is calculating when it hits and how much the bullet subtracts then the other part is calculating the health to subtract from, in this picture I have the bullets take 1 from 100 but in the version now I have it take 10 from 100 to kill them faster, this has helped me as if later on when I want to make enemy health im gonna need this but would like to add it so the bullets of a percentage to hit more or less then base value.

Textures

This is the texture I am using for all the walls and factory machinery. This is a texture i took myself when I was walking around town, using photoshop and blender i created the bump map and roughness texturing for it.

This is a texturing for the granite I used as for the flooring. I also used the same method as I did for the walls. To get the Roughness and occlusion map for the texture I used photoshop, by taking away the color and using gray scale instead it makes it easier to see the black and white level and its going to have to be black and white anyways so unreal engines texture coding can pick up the depth. Roughness map is used to take away the black and give it more depth while the occlusion map takes away the white giving the surface a little more shine on the surface. The Normal map was the more complicated one to get done as using blender is awkward and annoying and it took me awhile to get sued too. but what you do is you make a plain add some mods like increasing the poly and allowing to add a picture then using the roughness to it which makes it look rather jagged then you turn down the volume alittle and add another plane and bake that texture with the plane, im new to this technique so i cant get the best results at the moment but with a little playing around i will be able to make more detailed textures.

Todays lesson i was revising my texture knowledge using a tutorial i found on YouTube about making layered texturing blends that allow to have a smooth transition between things like mud and foliage. I also looked into bump mapping and how to make a material seem more 3d and realistic when its still a flat texture. Most people use secondary software's that you need to download and i cant do that until i go home and do some work. Adding this knowledge to my game would help it look less plain and more atmospheric.

Weapon mechanics

I first Started by creating three custom events for what i want to happen, pull trigger release and fire. From the pull trigger I added a DoOnce node that makes sure what ever happens only happens once, linked up to a Target Actor node selecting gun so it will fire from the gun, and then set timer to 1 divided by 7 as rounds per second however my code seems to only fire once in general so I am looking to fix it.

The first not is and event beginplay, so when the game starts its plays this piece of code. Its then hooked up to a sequence which allows me to add multiple beginning play codes but for no it only has one. The spawn actor makes it spawn in the world then i set it to spawn on a arrow component by the side of our character. the bit at the bottom is my basic shoot mechanic ive done where left clicking fire ive not figured how to make it semi-automatic as it is a Gatling gun.

For the material of the weapon i used a simple material changed it to addative so it only makes it look brighter, and for the coluor i had this of shade of green into a multiply with a param that changes the brightness of the colour.

Zombie Ai

For the zombies i used a player sensing node to make the zombies follow me. The cast too node allows it to identify the player or what it should follow and the move to sets to the location of the player so it knows where the player is at all times.

I wanted to give the zombies a more of a random walking before they see me, so they look a little more alive rather then just being statues. Event start into some branches gives the set up of if its calculations for whether its in range or not or moving or not, AI Move To node gives the zombies it intelligence to move to and random location with in the parameter. Get actor location and get random point node allows the zombie AI to give it a point to walk to at a random point in a radius.

Game inspirations

Call of Duty is heavily inspired me to maker this game as I enjoyed the original and still in love with Zombies in the recent Call of Duty. I enjoyed original zombies as for its time it was such a new game even if it was a mini-game not really expected to be much from the developers but the game mode blew up for good reason it was hard addictive and fun, the colour scheme in the game all blended with the theme of the entire game not just the Zombies aspect, the game mode didn't feel like a random addition but part of the game and story. The theme was world war 2 Nazi Zombies set inside some sort of bunker, there a variety of different scenery not just plain concrete walls, there were cars, railings, trenches and a mine where zombies could come out of. and they werent just in everyplace each angle was different north scenery was different to south south different to west west different to east.

Not only that but there were also different objects inside the rooms too, dotted around so nothing felt repetitive about the scenery which made it that more enjoyable to play. As for gameplay it was rather basic as expected from a minigame, you survive waves with limited weapons and ammo, what made the game much better was the implementation of a mystery box allowing you to get stronger weapons you can find out of the game, such as heavy machine guns and flame throwers but also there unique item the Ray gun that shot out green disks that could kill multiple enemies at once how ever with every guns strengths when the wave it in the hundreds the zombies scaled to the point that it took a lot more to take them down. another cool aspect they added was after every 4th round the 5th would spawn hell hounds instead of zombies which were faster and did much more damage.

Zombie idea

The Zombies in our game arnt going to be actual zombies, to keep a randomness vibe to our game we are thinking of making the "zombies" more like rabid teddy bears as the lore behind our game is about a mad scientist that created an apocalypse just because he could, but the only resource he could find was a factory full of teddys that he brought for cheap because the toy company went broke, he ended up using the teddys as an experiment for a reanimation liquid he created but he also added a savage hunger gene to the potion because he thought it was funny but eneded up creating these rabid teddys. He could easily cure the teddies if he wanted to but he enjoys playing with peoples lives and released them to the public as a "natural selection" order.
The teddy design is going to be a ribbed up vibe showing there "insides" and coated in blood, there will be a variation of bears, different sizes, colours and what not. They will be slow moving and rather savage looking.

Weapon design

As for the weapons in game there are three variants shotgun, pistol and sub-machine gun. These guns are design by Isiah but i've provided the images for him, we are using the classic trench gun from CoD Zombies and everyone's favorite Tommy gun, as for the pistol its just  Makarov handgun. what will make our weapons different is they are going to have a more futuristic or supernatural feel towards depending on how we want our game to progress. For future feel i'm thinking about adding glowing pods of energy where the ammo chamber usually is and when fired it shoot miniature orbs that leave a blue mist behind. For the supernatural feel im thinking of having a more wooden and stone design to the body of the guns with engraved magic circles that glow when you fire.

This is a mood bored of all the things that fit the theme of my game, some future and present desolate buildings and some other nice pictures i added for inspiration.

The Game idea/Client Meeting

My project will be a collaboration with Isiah my partner in crime as we have both had an idea to create a zombie wave based game similar to CoDs zombie gamemode. This will be a continuous project but for the first 7 weeks of production our aim is to create the mechanics for the game in away where we can add more to it so it will be a plain biscuit for now. We have decided to cut down on production time there will only be a few mechanics in the game and three pick up weapons in the form of a pistol, shotgun and sub-machine gun allowing us to keep it simple. I have already found a tutorial to help me make the mechanics for the zombies such as AI, animation and damage calculations. This tutorial is also a series of other tutorials to help recreate Call of Duty zombies however i will also be looking in making this game more unique the main help is the zombies and the weapon mechanics that I will be focusing on. Isiahs half of the project will be to create all the assets along side when i am making the game to speed up production time. As for the style of the game it wont be heavily created as we are aiming for a playable game rather then a beautiful game so it could turn out with box zombies and weapons but hopefully we can achieve hyper realistic graphics as i already know how to make graphics that look nice i the unreal engine and have an archive of different materials that I took pictures of when I was on holiday to Lanzarote. We have a friend who voice acts as a hobby that can help us have dialogue for our game to make it feel more alive, and i can make music using FL Studio 12 to have our own music in the game, all this will be produced outside of college work times to increase our production time so we can get this game functioning smoothly and nicely. This will be a sort of test build/Tutorial to the game so when we go into the next project we dont have to focus on making any core mechanics and we can play around with level design character design and added features.