Script:
[Intro] - James
Hey, welcome back to our devlog series where we are showcasing the development of our final year project for college. We’ve now been working on this game for around 3 weeks and are excited to share the progress we have made over the last week.
[Overview] - Dan
Throughout this week I mainly researched mechanics as research is one of the main areas we are graded on. This included looking into preexisting movement shooters like doom, titanfall & Karlson. These games have very similar mechanics to our idea of the game so are great to look into for inspiration. We want to include wall-running and fast movement which is one of the main focuses of titanfall and Karlson. As well as research I worked on my blog as a way to showcase my weekly contributions & research towards the project.
I decided to spend some time on player animations using inverse kinematics. Our player now has working IK feet which change height depending on the objects they are standing on top of. As you can see from the video playing in the background I started work on an IK gun system. This allows the players’ hand position to change during runtime separately from the player's animation.
Over the next week, I will be working on fixing up the IK guns as well as adding weapon swapping, pickups, & shooting. I will also look into adding health and damage to players allowing for some basic combat.
[Overview] - James
This week I’ve made a heavy focus on finalising research for both graphic and level design. I looked into some real-life examples for my level design, talking about games such as Halo, Splitgate, Overwatch, Get to the Orange Door, and more. I’ve decided to base my levels primarily on Splitgate and Halo, as they both feature a large amount of high ground and vertical mobility which will be a prominent feature in our game. I researched a lot about 3-lane maps and thought about how I would incorporate this into my level design.
I spent a few hours creating the first draft for a map and we spent a little while playtesting to see how it felt. I made some key mistakes with this first map that make it largely unplayable without a lot of practice. The first mistake was not giving the player enough room to move. It's very difficult to access the doorways into corridors and it takes a lot of precision to even get close. The first time I tried testing the level it took a good 10-20 attempts to get out of the large chambers on either end of the map. I also didn’t take the player physics into account with the player hitting their head on the corridor ceiling whenever they jump. The level feels very awkward to navigate and is a long way from the smooth, seamless movement we were aiming to create. We have a lot of tweaking to do on my level design and the player physics, but we’re off to a good start.
I also started creating some weapons for Dan to test his IK on. I initially created an AK-47 and then went on to make a sawed-off shotgun. From my research, I got the idea that old PS1 game devs aimed to keep their models below 500 triangles. Game engines automatically triangulate models as it’s much easier to calculate a triangle than a quad. A single cube is made up of 12 triangles, so you can imagine how much this limits me in terms of model detail. As well as this, early PS1 games had a texture quality of 128x128 pixels, with later games managing 256x256, which is the quality I chose. This means I need to fit the entire texture map of each gun onto a 256x256 image, which isn’t easy. I’m happy with both models, and despite the AK being around 150 triangles over my target, I still think it gives off the classic look I was aiming to recreate.
Throughout the next week I want to work on more level design. I’m aware of the issues with my current design and I know what I need to do to iron these problems out, so that will be my main focus. I’ll probably ditch the first level for the time being and develop a more open level that allows me to design without worrying about player physics and enclosed spaces. Hopefully, we will have fully functional weapons by then and we’ll be able to test my new level out in a PvP environment.
[Outro] - Dan
As well as all of the cool stuff James and I have been working on we have welcomed a new member to the project. Oscar is another student from a different college and is in his first year of a music course. As you can imagine this means he’ll be working with us to create completely original soundtracks for the game. This is a huge opportunity for all of us as uniquely tailored music will really help push this project a step further. If you made it this far into the video thank you it really means a lot to us. Feel free to leave feedback in the comment section below or contact us through our social media which will be linked in the description.
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