Devlog Week 1: (06/10/2024)

Throughout this week on developing my open world stylised rpg game and 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 its goal is to hunt down certain amount of npcs and transform them into vampires before the sun comes up In order 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 day time the vampire player must hide from the sun inside houses but they must be careful as the hunter AI is searching for you and if the hunter finds you the hunter wins

Vampire players will have the ability to compel npcs, and the ability to transform into a bat while the hunter will have to do platforming in order to defeat the vampire. If the player chooses the hunter, they will have some weapons such as a crossbrow, a wooden stake, etc, in order 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 collage 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 to get along with but I never game up on learning something new.

With the frustrations with unreal I than started to learn some tutorials on YouTube to at least get a character movement and I was surprised it was really easy. And I wanted to add more stuff but there wasn’t many tutorials witch was another frustration.

First Character Model

I was having thoughts if I made the right choice on making this huge switch. And so I began making concept art for how the character would look. During summer 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 stuff but it wasn't enough and i wasn't happy with it .  i then I made my last attempt to make this game and its concept idea this week and this is the video  of it