Final Thesis Post

The last week of thesis was pretty successful. I've continued to work on game mechanics and created my final presentation for the semester which can be found here.

In total about 8 hours of work.

Week 13 (Belated)

In the past week I worked on blueprints and functionality within the game. After watching some videos on the turn-based plugin I started working in the code to add my own meshes to the scene. The screenshot below shows two separate things.

1-The game can function and react to  the placeholder meshes that I place in the game world. This is achieved by placing invisible tiles underneath the mesh which tell the game what tiles should be disabled.

2-Using an array and a random number generator I was able to create a blueprint class which will select from a list of meshes and place one in the scene at a designated location. This will allow me to create one or more levels quickly with interesting and varied structures. These buildings are also blocked from walking units without needing to designate each tile as blocked

I also decided to include some of my substance painter work on last week's assets. These screenshots are directly from substance painter and represent the ideal textures. Achieving the same quality in Unreal will be challenging but there are plenty of ways to improve the look before the final version.

Week 12

Week 12 was very productive with about 18 hours of thesis work. I've finished the Trailer/Shipping crate science lab with solar array and satellite dish. This is one of the more complicated structures in the game. (Screenshots at the bottom)

Next week I'll get to work on another main structure.

Week 11

Week 11 was a slow week for asset production (3 hours). I did get a lot of good work done on the rig which will run the animations for all three of the game's main class characters. Next week I will be continuing to work on structures within the game.

Week 10

This week I continued work on designing and constructing the buildings in the scene. I worked a total of 5 hours this week on the project. After doing a rough sketch of each building I got to work on a solar panel array for one of the science structures. Next week I'll be continuing to work on the buildings for the game.

Below are some screenshots of the solar panels.

Week 9

This week I started work on the first building for the game. The scavenging hut is the building for the stealth class within the game. This building is designed to be the most dilapidated in the game, showing the scavenger's nature of combining parts from different places to create something. I ran into a problem setting up ID maps to texture the building because of the number of unique objects for this structure but I'll finish working through it and have this textured early in the week. The upcoming week will be used to create more buildings for the game.

Week 7

I decided to make a change this week and postpone the game design aspect of things for a while and transition into the visuals and underlying systems in Unreal. Setting up resource management in Unreal will make playtesting much easier, and since the basics of the game are done I can start work on the three classes within the game and all of the structures I'll need to create. This also gives me more time in my game design class to learn about constructing a balanced and fun game.

About 5 hours of work total on the week.