Games Project - Game Creation Week 3

Week 3 continued pretty much in the same direction as the previous week as we continued to do individual learning so that we could understand what we needed to do for our own section of the game. Unreal Engine has a vast amount of tutorials on their official website and on their YouTube channel and their forums  are full of helpful people answering any questions that you can think of. With all these resources available it seems really plausible that we will be able to throw something together. My only real concern is being able to bring it together at the end because it will involve migrating files and blueprints between the three of us and that could cause problems if it doesn't go as planned.

In terms of issues and problems there isn't much to say as none of us have delved into the thick of it yet but I imagine we will be soon enough and that's when we will be encountering issues and the like. I will say that from preliminary research it is a well laid out system and seems to be fairly simple to navigate and use. With the assistance of the multitude of tutorials it feels very easy to be able to learn this system so here's hoping we can develop a game over the upcoming weeks. However, I will be interested to see what UE4 can offer for both current projects and future projects once we all have a greater understanding of how it can work and what it can be used to deliver. 

Overall for the next few weeks I think that our goals will be to simply grasp and play around with the engine to get a feel of what it is we will be working with. This will allow us to come to terms with how much work we will have and so that in the end we can seriously churn out a game that we can say that we have created from scratch. 

Games Project - Game Creation Week 2

This week each of us decided to take the time to look into tutorials and research how we are going to accomplish our end goals. As far as documentation goes for software Epic Games seem to have a good amount on Unreal Engine which is incredibly helpful and insightful into how it all works and how each function can be used. With all this information freely available it feels like learning how to use this will be a bit easier than first imagined. 

I spent much of this week diving into both the side scrolling tutorial and the third person tutorials as they seemed to give a good footing in terms of Unreal Engine. Despite both being for different game genres they both gave good advice in terms of how to link up the blueprints and together and give a good grasp of the basics in terms of learning how the blueprint system works.

Andrew spent time reading up on the documentation about AI behaviour trees as this is what he would need to know about when the time came to using the blueprinting function and the construction scripts in order to program the AI for the enemies. He will be looking into how to create different types of AI in order for our game to have multiple enemies to fight with although we will discuss this further as a team to see if it will be advantageous to have two or three okay AI's or one really good one.

Ben spent a lot of this week looking at how Unreal Engine really worked as it was myself and Andrew who created the prototype meaning that Ben was inexperienced with the software as a whole so he spent time familiarising himself with Unreal Engine. His job will be to design the levels and create them so that we can then start placing in the enemies and main character into each level in order for us to have a solid working game.

Overall this has been a simple week of research and self study to find all of the resources and tutorials we will need for the upcoming weeks.

Games Project - Game Creation Week 1

This part of the blog will be dedicated to following our group as we progress from the design and planning stage of the games project to the second part of our project which is creating the game.

As stated before our software of choice will be Unreal Engine 4 as we decided that it would be beneficial to use this software because in our honours year we will  be using it again and a being able to have navigated it and had experience with it will be advantageous. Unreal Engine is also widely used for game development so there are pages and videos with tutorials that would assist and help us through the start of our development process. Along side an array of videos Unreal Engine has a website and forums all which are full of useful information on how to learn Unreal Engine.

Our overall process is to plan what work we have to do, divide it up into 3 main sections and then each of us will branch off and learn how to work with what we need to do and then we will begin to bring it together in later weeks. At a quick discussion this week we seemed to have come to the conclusion that I will be working on the main character and going over what I need to do to make the character work, Andrew will be working on AI and how they will interact with the environment and finally Ben will be working on the levels and texturing for the game.

. Nathan - Main Character Blueprinting and Programming

. Andrew - AI Blueprinting and Programming

. Ben - Level Creation and Design

Whilst the next few weeks will be hard it will all be worth it for next year when we need to call upon our experience with UE4 as we will have a module in level development along with our own personal projects that will use UE4 so we all believed it to be beneficial to take the plunge now and then be prepared for later on.