DevBlog 1

🎮 DevBlog Week 1 (02/10/2024) – Kicking Off My Final Year Game Project

 By: Dennys da Silva

Starting work on My final year college assignment to make a game, I’ve spent the past few week or so working on my game concept and have come up with a good concept idea and I am super excited about.

High Concept

Settling on a good concept wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. This year in game design, our class was told to make any type of game we desired. There are no limitations on how many people can be in a group. However I decided to do this project solo. Without a group, it is hard to come up with ideas, game mechanics, storytelling, etc. But I knew that not being in a group would be a challenge, and It what makes me think outside of the box when I was told to make any game.

With all the other games that I have made throughout the years in college, there was always a requirement, and it made me and my team think outside the box but not for this game. It's made me stop and think of what type of game I would want to make. With no limitations I was thinking about the art style of the game, if I would make it realistic, cartoon, sci-fi or stylised. When I was brainstorming on what type of game I would make, I was thinking about Tim Burton's art style and stop motion technique. Tim Burton created a unique art style called “Burtonesque”. The art style is similar to a stylised look; movies like Corpse Bride are a great example.  So, I decided to make my game in a stylised look that I would create.

My first idea would be an open-world game, but the question is how can I make an open-world game, what would the core game mechanics be, would it involve this and that. I got frustrated about how I would make this. So I changed my mind about it. My second game idea would be a platformer game with a limitation to an open world. When I was younger I used to play video games on a PSP(PlayStation portable). Games like Ben 10, Jak and Daxter and Rachet and clank inspired me to how a platformer game would look and feel. With this idea in mind, I would brainstorm how I would implement these ideas into a game engine. With a platformer and open-world RPG game with a stylised look in mind, I started brainstorming on the story of the game, how the game would look and the core mechanics of the game.

 🎮 DevBlog Week 1: (12/10/2024)– Getting Started

Date: 02/10/2024 By: Dennys da Silva

Been busy for the last few days, but I’m super happy to share my progress.

Current Work:

Throughout this week on developing my open world stylised rpg game I started to come up with ideas of what the game mechanics would be. Once the player starts the game they will have the option to either choose as a  vampire or hunter.  

Game Core Mechanics

The game will always start at night time and slowly start daytime.  If a person chooses to play as the vampire, the goal is to hunt down a certain amount of npcs and transform them into vampires before the sun comes up. To win as a vampire, the player must transform all the npcs into vampire

If the sun comes up and the vampire player is outside, the vampire player will burn and die, turning into ash. If it is daytime, the vampire player must hide from the sun inside houses, but they must be careful as the hunter AI is searching for them, and if the hunter finds them, the hunter wins

Vampire players will have the ability to compel NPCs and transform into a bat, while the hunter will have to do platforming to defeat the vampire. If the player chooses the hunter, they will have some weapons such as a crossbow, a wooden stake, etc; to win as a hunter, they must hunt down all vampires in the city to win

I was in a debate with myself if I should use unreal engine 5 or unity 6, I wanted my game to look beautiful with a stylised feature. and so I have begun developing the game mechanics within unreal engine 5.

My first struggle

During my  3 years of college, I have always used Unity for developing small group projects, and making a switch to Unreal would be like starting 1^st year all over again. I was convinced that I would be able to make the game, but the blueprint coding system in unreal was confusing me. The layout of Unreal was hard to get along with, and with the frustrations with Unreal, I then started to learn some tutorials on YouTube to at least get a character movement, and I was surprised it was really easy. I wanted to add more stuff, but there weren’t many tutorials, which was another frustration.

First Character Model

I was having thoughts about whether I made the right choice in making this huge switch. And so I began making concept art for how the character would look. During the summer of 2024, I started using Reallusion Character Creator 4, and it was easy to create any type of character and have a workflow using Zbrush for modelling, and I have made up this model. For the main vampire player

The good thing about using the workflow of Character Creator 4 and ZBrush is that in CC4, the models already come rigged, so you don't have to worry about weight painting and animating because CC4 provides you with everything. However, the poly count was very high, and doing retopology on this character would just be a time waste, so I knew that it would be a waste of time.

Second attempt at Unreal

With the character model, I would start to have ideas about how I wanted the game to look and feel. The good thing is that CC4 has a plugging for UE5, and you can have a workflow between the two as well to test animations. The retargeting in UE5 is really easy to set up, and I was an advantage. 

During this week, I was able to achieve a few things, but it wasn't enough, and I wasn't happy with it.  i I then made my last attempt to make this game and its concept idea this week, and this is the video  of it 

My progress and goals for next week:

Make a new unity project

Implement necessary packages such as cinemachine, new input system, post processing, etc

Work on player controller

Collectables

and simple AI