Initial ideas:-
Idea 1 - Sci-fi shooter made in the Unreal engine. This
shooter would be first person with a indoor a spacecraft.
Idea 2 - Another indoor sci-fi shooter in set in a place
such as botanical gardens. Still made in the Unreal engine.
Idea 3 – A game such as prison break, where you have been
put into prison but you are actually a cop. You have been put into jail by a
mafia boss that you have put away earlier on in your career.
Now to show my 3 moodboards.
This first moodboard shown here is for idea number 3, the second moodboard is for idea number is idea number two. The last moodboard is ideas and thoughts for idea number one. I was going to make idea number one but on a convosation with drew and matt they told me to challenge myself and make a level in udk instead of making one in source.
Inspiration for ideas.
Inspiration for Idea one.
Inspiration for Idea one was a bit of halo and resistance
mixed together. I thought I could use the unreal engine as I know it is a
sci-fi engine as unreal tournament is sci-fi-ish. Also from previous knowledge
of the engine I know I could very easily pull that sort of game off.
Inspiration for Idea two.
Inspiration for Idea two was a game I have only recently
started playing called Warframe. It has drawn me into a whole new genre that I
didn’t think I would enjoy but after playing Warframe I and looking into
playing more 3rd person games. I had the same sort of idea with the
sci-fi idea as in idea one. But I wanted to change this one from just being the
normal sci-fi with no greener and just neon lights. I wanted to take this one
down the route of a botanical gardens sort of environment. This will be unique
in my eyes as I don’t see many sci-fi games in a jungle sort of area. But I
have been informed that crisis 3 is sort of the same as my idea so I kind of
avoided taking this idea further.
Inspiration for Idea three.
Inspiration for Idea three was when I was watching the hit
TV show Hawaii 5-0 in the Easter holiday. There was a cop called Chin Ho Kelly
who had put away this gang leader/ dirty cop. Who had then wanted to take his
revenge by bringing him a cop into a prison where as we all know prisoners hate
cops. The game would be set in the UK not Hawaii as I would be able to do more
first person and secondary research as my uncle works in a jail. The whole aim
of the game is to break out of the prison with your life intact whilst being
attacked by everyone apart from the jail staff. But some of the jail staff have
been convinced to help this gang leader and will try and cause you to take
paths that you really don’t want to take as of that you will be led into fights
and scuffles.
Pitch and Character design.
Character research –
Mafia/gang boss will be of Italian origin. Will be slightly large in complexion
and will have a cigar with a suit on.
Cop will be your average cop. But when you get put in jail
he will acquire items such as scissors
and shank made from a tooth brush. As well a mobile phone which has no battery
so you have to find the battery in the jail. The battery will be in the nurse’s
office which you will then befriend the nurse as she is one of the only people
in the jail that doesn’t want your head on a stake. She also gives you the
blueprints for the jail. Then once you have contacted the outside you then try
and find your way to the underground basement exit. Meanwhile the whole jail is
being made aware that you are trying to escape and then all of the people you
have put away and more of the criminals in jail conspire against you and stop
you from getting to the exit. Once you get caught you will be taken to the main
guy that overhauled the whole prison, who then gathers everyone around to see
you get your last wishes. But meanwhile outside the police, Mi5 and other
security forces have gathered and are planning a mission to get in and out with
you and their life’s intact. So of your friends in Mi5 get restless and go
against orders and fly over the prison in a helicopter even though the
government has made the area over the prison a no fly zone. They land the
helicopter in the field next door and put their immense training to good use
and you get out safely. Once you have been recused you go and save the nurse
that gave you the phone to save your life as you owe it to her to be honest.
What the mafia boss did too first get put into prison. He
was caught trafficking drugs from Argentina and Peru into Europe and when he
was landed in this country you had enough intel on him to put him away for a
good while but as he has a good lawyer he gets his sentence deducted and is out
within in 8 years but that is not long enough to wait he wants his revenge
while he is still in jail. Somehow, he contacts the outside and arranges for you
to be kidnapped and then he tells his guys on the outside to hold you in
captivity until he has won over the prison guards and can get you in here. To
get you in without you knowing where you are going, you get drugged just before
you are taken to be put inside the jail. Once you wake up you find yourself in
Orange overalls and you instantly know something is up. You get made to go to
and work on the fields doing community service, when another person you have
put away recognises you. This is your moment to make a friend and as he has
been in here for a while he knows his way around and how to skip your community
service. Then that’s where your adventure begins…
Plan for the weeks ahead.
Week One.
In week one i will try to create a good picture on what i want to do by coming up with many different ideas and exploring them to the full potential. I will also make moodboards on them as this is a good way to get evidence for the certain units they cover.
Week Two.
In week two, i will finalise which idea out of the three i will go with. I intend to do that by asking drew, matt and simon to get their opinions on which one will be challenging enough but also not so hard that it wont be achieveable in the 6 weeks we have.
Week Three.
In week three i intend to start work on the idea i have choosen. In my honest opinion at the end of this week i should have the level bricked out so i have left myself enough time to cover all my bases in terms of all the writing and evaluative process we have to do at the end of this project.
Week Four.
In week four the game should really be taking shape. I hope to have the whole level mapped out and completed without textures in it. I will leave the textures till last as they are quite straight forward. I also intend to be searching for models to use if i havent already found them by this point in time.
Week Five.
Week five as i mentioned in week four will be mainly texturing and alpha test runs. These alpha test runs are a essential part of any level design so that you can see if you have made any mistakes that can be corrected in the next week that we have left of this project. But these 7 days will also be spent trying to improve the appeal of the level by making any improvements i get when i get people to take a questionaire once they have played the alpha edition of the level.
Week Six.
This week i should be making any final changes that i have seen or have been pointed out to me. But if im honest this week should be set to doing all of the write ups so i can get the maximum grade i can get for this project. Which means i can even work on work that i have outstanding grades for.
Evaluation.
In this project we were asked to create a brief which we have full reign on what we could do for our final project. My first thoughts were "Hmmm, can we work in a group but that got quelled very fast as most of our year this year has been group projects. So i then began creating ideas as you can see earlier on in this blog. The ideas i thought i come up with were original ideas but going round the room talking to certain people about their idea i quickly began to see that two of my three ideas were prodominatly being made by more than one person. This is because UDK (Unreal Development Kit) really does restrict you to do a sci-fi shooter unless you highly mod the engine.
So i decided on my third idea, the idea was to make a prison break inspired level. It was also based on a tv show that i had seen a week before the project was lauched. The tv programme was Hawaii 5-0, the episode was called Olelo HoʻOpaʻI Make. Which in english means Death Chamber. The whole episode was based around a cop that had put away this 'Dirty Cop' in jail and the dirty cop wanted to take his revenge. He had the whole jail on side as the cop that put him away was part of the organisation called 5-0, that puts every criminal they possible can behind bars and keep the streets of Hawaii safe.
Now you know about my inspriations and thoughts i will now go onto reviewing how well i stuck to the plan i set myself in the brief and on my blog. If you go back and look at weeks 1-2 i feel that i stuck to my plans and ambitions. As i created serveral moodboards and researched all three of my idea extensively. But it all went down hill in week three as i said in week three i would start making my level in UDK (Unreal Development Kit) but i was still sitting on the fence on whether i had the knowledge to mod the engine myself or even if it was the best choice of software to use.
I had to mod the engine so i could get a 3rd person aspect into the game, so you could look over your shoulder and check if you were being chased as you were breaking out of the prison. This was a great idea but i didnt have the confidence and drive to mod the engine so week three of my proposed plan did not go to plan and then i was always playing catch up. This wasnt never good as the final project is where you show off all your talent, and try something new. As i didnt have to confidence to try that something new i was behind from here on in, so it was made more difficult than it should have been. In week three i did so something i wanted to do but this was very minimal in the swing of things. I set out to have a convosation with drew, matt and simon and i did and they gave me some advice for places to go for models and mod's etc.
Week four went pretty badly as i had hoped to have a pre-alpha developed and ready to be slightly changed. But i was only starting the level design in week 4 when it should have been started end of week 2 at the latest start of week 3. I was still wondering what engine to use, but half way through week four i started my level in source and this is the progress i made...
That was the final design at the end of week four. There were still many bugs and texture fixs that needed to happen. So week five i had to really knuckle down and flesh the level out more than a spawn room and a few jail cells.
Week five started slow, were i was being distracted far too easily so i decided to move down the room, which could be thought of a bad move but it got me working as me, matt and james were all helping each other out making sure we all had the drive to complete these levels for the deadline. I did get some opinons on the level off of matt and james, there opinion was that i needed an objective to the level which i totally argeed with as it is quite boring just walking around a level so half way through the week, i came up with an idea where you have to collect all the keys to exit the prison.
Week six was very hectic trying to finish in time for the deadline, but when drew came in on the friday and said we had till saturday night, i think i took that a bit to far as on the last friday i slacked off really too much than i should of any only just had it finished for the deadline on saturday. I missed a couple of things out that i think could have drasticly improved my grades.
To overall evaluate my performance and workload in this project was pretty poor. As this evaluation should have been done the friday before hand in but from my explanation earlier on. I could have stuck to my plan and managed my time remarkably better than i did. But overall i think it was a bad project but the outcome will be ok but not the best if i had put all my effort into it.
