Planning
This is the gantt chart I made for this FMP. We received the brief at March 6th but as you can see I already started planning and researching before receiving the brief because I already had some initial ideas before the project started, it’s the same with character design because I made concept art.
For planning and research I will be doing mainly primary research as my game will be narrative based most of the research I can do is watch movies, play games and read books but there will also be some secondary research mainly for looking up Unreal techniques. I will also be doing concept art for characters and levels. By the 7th week I’d say I would have completed planning and research.
You can see that in week 2, 3 and 4 of my gantt chart I will spend three days working on level design. This is because the first 2 or three levels are only pixel art and should only take around three days to complete maximum depending on the level it may even take just 2 days to draw. You can also see that I will also be doing research alongside the level design because I like to look up locations that help me visualise my level, for example I plan on having a lost jungle level with Mayan architecture so I of course need to look up Mayan ruins and art. From week 7 all the way to the middle of week 8 I will be doing more level design and the reason why this requires more time is because I was planning on making this level 3D.
Similarly to the level design, the designing process for the characters should only take three days max to make and for some characters I don’t even have to do certain animations for some of the characters so it might not even take a day to complete some. I did gave myself extra time at around week 9 just in case I wanted to make certain changes to my characters.
In week 5 I will be adding my tiles to Unreal Engine and making the level. Also by this time my main character should have been finished so I by this time I should have added my character, set up it’s animation and gave it health. By week 10 I should have finished drawing and modelling my assets so I gave myself 12 days to complete each level and programme the AI for my game.
Lastly the audio I left for last because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make the soundtrack in FamiTracker mainly because I’ve never made music before in my life but I will be making sound effects.
Skills I’ll need to learn.
A good 2D platformer game needs to have something stopping the player from advancing so I will need to have a some basic enemy AI. My AI needs to be patrolling side to side like the Goombas from Mario and since I plan on making it a 2D shooter like Contra I would like my AI to shoot back at the player. I can do this by looking up how on YouTube or I can ask my Tutor to teach me or to have a workshop dedicated to AI.
I would also like to have a checkpoint system mainly because there may be difficult parts in my game and having a checkpoint system would make sense.
Aside from AI and checkpoints, I don’t really need to learn much more. I could learn how to make an inventory system but I’m still not sure if I even want to have this in my game or if I have the time to make an inventory system.
Week 1 – Week 5
So far I have stayed on schedule the only thing causing a problem for me is Unreal Engine. This is just because my specialty isn’t in Unreal Engine but I can quickly get the hang of it by simply watching YouTube tutorials. This may mean I will need more time to research but it shouldn’t change much in my schedule. Other than that however, most of the work I have done so far is photoshop work and I am already skilled in photoshop from my previous project.
So far I’ve added my character sprites to unreal. I already have a vague idea on how to do this but I needed to make sure so I used WazzaTut’s 2D sidescroller tutorial series for help.
The last video is the most useful bit of primary research as i taught me how to use an Unreal Blueprint known as Enumeration which basically just organizes my flipbook animations.
Week 6
I made a list of all of the things I needed to make a 2D game.
List:
- Tile Maps
- Level Transitions and Loading Screens
- Projectiles
- Moving Platforms
- Enemy AI
Here are the videos I found on YouTube that helped.
Tilemaps
Loading Screens
Projectiles
Moving Platforms
As you can see WazzaTuts covered almost all of the things one would need to make a 2D side scroller game. I will continue to use his tutorials if I ever get stuck.
Also the reason why I don’t have a video on how to make an Enemy AI is because Lee told me that there is a much simpler method for 2D side scroller style games. I will cover this in my ‘Creating the Game‘ blog.
I figured I could use my new found knowledge and apply to a test level. This test level ended up looking good enough for me to make the tutorial level for my game.
Week 7 – Issues with the character design.
Here is the first character design I made.
At first I felt satisfied by this but then… I made the enemy sprite.
I was more satisfied with how the enemy turned out than I was for the main character design. The reason why I wasn’t as satisfied with the main character design than I was with the enemy design was mainly the black outline I use to make the main character but there are other things I wish to change. I didn’t like the bulkiness of the main character design so I wanted to make him thinner, also I wanted to change the character perspective by making him look like his body is facing the side. Lastly I didn’t like the cartoonish look of the character
By this time I had already finished the design of my friend Owain’s character as well so I needed to change his character design as well. This whole process obviously changed my schedule and I may not even have time to make the last level for my game.
This is what my timetable ended up looking like after the character design change.
I changed my week 7 – 8 schedule. Before I would have used this time to make the 3D final level but I felt that changing the character design was more important than adding another level. You could also see I added gave myself more time for unreal work for week 8 – 9 because I needed to add in the animation for the new characters. Lastly I gave myself 5 days to add other stuff for the level. These are things like health pick ups, obstacles such as spikes Loading screens and also a health bar which will be made in Photoshop and not just in Unreal.
Week 8 – 9 – Game Breaking level transition bug and USB storage.
I pretty much stuck to the new schedule. I finished making the new character designs and I added the animations. This didn’t take as much time as it did before with the previous character because I already knew what I was doing. I even had extra time to make the next level after the tutorial level which is the level I call ‘Crab Island‘.
This is where everything started going haywire. Since I now had two levels I figured I could use what I learnt from the level transition video I found on YouTube and and make the transition from the tutorial level and the island level. I did the same exact thing as what the person did in the video and it worked perfectly I even tested it myself but for some reason when I went to show my friend my progress with the loading screen it would just flicker back and forth from tutorial level to island level (bare in mind that I didn’t add or change anything in the blueprint). the worst part of this bug was the fact that Unreal was unable to tell us where the issue was coming from and I couldn’t reload an autosave because the problem still occurred. What ended up doing was restarting my progress. Luckily I could copy 70% of the blueprints I made from the previous project and paste it in the new Unreal Project. Then my USB became full and the project shut itself down before I could even save.
As you can probably tell, these issues scraped off time from my schedule and I had to make time rebuilding what was lost from the previous project.
As you can see in my timetable I would have spent the last 2 weeks making the audio meaning SFX, voice acting and soundtrack. But because I spent 2 days trying to fix my problem and 3 days recreating what was lost and also blog about everything I do after I do them I needed to cancel the soundtrack (which probably wouldn’t have even been that good considering that I’ve never made music before in my life) and also limit the amount of SFX I make, I was also able to shorten the script for to reduce the amount of voice acting needed by getting rid of some characters. this took me an hour to change.
This is what my schedule ended up looking like after.
I have extended my time working in Unreal to finish the game and shorten the time needed to make the audio. The days where I am working on Unreal and the Audio at the same time will be days where I am working on the SFX. The last four days will be used for voice acting.
Nick Amalin 