Milestone 2: Unity Level

This is the basic game, for the time being the camera is attached to the capsule character, in the series of images it is clear that the point and click scripts worked in the game.

At this point baking the nav mesh was no trouble as the map was flat.

I sat down with Jason (My teams Concept Artist) and we decided on where to place all the cameras within the game, in the beginning there were a limited number of cameras to be placed.

We then placed the cameras and I started working on making the script to control them, there were many way to go about coding the camera system, however Ewan's (Unit Lecturer) way was far better, rather than control each camera in the game the script could simply transform the position of the main camera on every trigger enter.

Then the testing began.

After seeing all the cameras work I got to work on making a light source that the player would carry, this light would make the area around the player visible while making areas farther away barely visible, this would make the game level more frightening and mysterious to the player

The gameplay prototype is near finished, there have been no real issues.

Milestone 1 - Concept Art

For our Year 2 Winter Submission, we were asked to work in a team of five and create a vertical slice of a game with two random themes; ours being World War II & Hospital. We also were given individual roles in the team, a Game Designer, Concept Artist, Environment Artist, Character Artist and a GUI/UI Artist.

There was quite some time spent relaying ideas on trench warfare (as the main aspect of our game) but I later informed the team that ground combat had changed substantially since the First World War. This left us with the familiar (often quite repeated) locations in history of World War II as our setting. As the concept artist of our group, I proposed three interesting unusual-in-game environments; Italy, Japan & Russia.

For the three settings, I made some Reference Material Sheets (as seen here) for the team to come to an agreement on just one.

While researching the countries, I found out quite a bit of history I didn't know about the Allies and Axis powers. This helped massively to generate story and plot ideas.

While looking at the environments, we had several things to take into perspective, such as the genre we all chose; horror. Finding what worked best was essential, as the atmosphere to horror has to be decent in order for it to pay off, especially with the audience and gameplay feel.

Out of nowhere, I had a eureka moment and knew where a great setting would be for our horror game. The Catacombs of Rome. In June 1944, Rome was liberated by the Allies. This gave us the opportunity to perhaps set the scene the month before in May. In addition, a fantastic idea we as a team thought of was the Nazi's had occupied the catacombs to hide secret experiments and weapons.

After more discussions, we finally went with the idea of the game set in Italy. Above is my brief character concepts I sketched of a medic soldier and objects you could possibly pick up along the way for the Point & Click aspect. 

Something I wanted to get sorted from the beginning was the storyline. As I am a massive fan for accuracy, I opted to help as the historical researcher. Although our game will be following fictional underground Nazi experiments/weapons, in order to give a good sense of believability, there needs to be a touch of realism like including the events of the Italian Campaign.

Game play prototype

The production of the game play prototype began when the basic models of the map and player were given in, thanks to this we could simulate the proportions and begin the build. 

Game design document

Art bible

The map

This is the layout of the map I drew, it is marked with the main events: the blue line represents the travel path, the Green dots are planned animations and events that would take place in the game.

This is a diagram I have drawn to show what sort of result I wanted from the game, it presents the layout of the game level on the screen, it shows the angle that the cameras would take and how visible the area would be, the camera positions are shown and the GUI menu items are in appropriate places.

The above diagram is a simple presentation of what would happen on camera change, the wall that would normally obstruct camera view would disapear.