Ryan - Games Design

I had an exceptionally busy week last week with family and friends visiting for my daughter's birthday. But I still felt like it was worth an update on my current project! I have go the basic elements of the drone down now and have also started to position enemies around the map ready for my AI system to be created. The drone system will hopefully have certain restrictions once I'm done with it to stop players from exploiting it! Drones will only be able to travel a certain distance and the cameras will only be viewable from that distance too. Players will only be able to use 3 drones at once, but they can use them to set up their own CCTV system to keep an eye on enemy locations!

This week I have been focusing my attention on getting the crawling mechanic sorted. My technical abilities aren't lacking, but this one took a lot for me to achieve. I needed to create an overlap event that triggers if the player is crouched near a vent entrance. This event involved removing the player mesh and sizing the collision capsule down by quite a significant amount! From here I also needed to make sure the camera wouldn't clip through the sides of the ventilation system as this would allow the players to see significant parts of the map they shouldn't be able to! My next job will be to implement the drone and eventually sort out the AI (this is probably going to be the biggest job!)

After finalising my piece I took a bit of time to reflect on how this 4 week brief has gone. I do feel like I may have taken on a bit more than I should have with this one. My understanding is probably that coming back after the summer I came back with a lot of enthusiasm and tried to take on too much! Thankfully I got my work to a reasonable state and though I felt I could have focused my attention on certain areas more than others (my actual level designs rather than the mechanics), I'm overall fairly proud of what was made! I think I made my design intentions fairly clear and structured and I hope they come across that way within my document and on my design video.

I have finished with my level blockout! It was a long time spent on it as my workload has been a lot, but I got there! I got the bulk built up before I realised that the opening section didn't make a lot of sense and was far too flat considering the different levels the rest of the map had. So I went back and redid the opening room. By adding a dropped section in the middle and turning the room into a loading bay, this gives the space a purpose and gives players more opportunity for cover. I also started adding some mechanics to the game at this point. The player can now grab onto ledges and pull themselves up, for this I used a blueprint pack from the Epic Marketplace called Custom Movement by Ju Sik Lee . Using this pack freed up a lot of my time to spend on other areas such as the vent crawling system and a drone exploration system!

The last week has been spent blocking out the initial design and altering any areas that I feel need work as I see them in a 3D space. I'm beginning to see that this level is going to be quite large and might take a couple of weeks to get every area built to a decent standard. But I also feel that as it takes shape, it's going to be a lot of fun to run around in! I am going to spend the next few days finishing the blockout and then spend some time within engine figuring out what mechanics I'll need to work on in order to traverse the area properly. I know for a fact that I'll need to work out how allow players to crawl through ventilation systems (heavily inspired by Metal Gear Solid!) While I've been blocking this level out, I have also been listening to a few talks on design for stealth games, including a great talk at GDC on the subject by Randy Smith which has given me a lot to think about.

Following my pitch meeting I realised I hadn't been deliberate enough with my design decisions. So I went back to the drawing board! Then it came to me: A puzzle-platformer based on the branching pathways of neural networks (or even Unreal Engines own blueprints!) – players have a brief moment to plot their pathway from multiple pathways ahead of them in the form of platforms. All pathways can be successfully passed, but some are more difficult to get through than others. These require a lot of precision from players in the incredibly short time they spend on the platforms to make their decisions going forward. I spent a lot of time after my pitch meeting dissecting my design to give it more clarity and direction. Once I’d come up with the concept, I drew out a level to map out how the new mechanical ideas would interact with the level. Feeling more confident with my idea I head back into Unreal to map it out in 3D space and begin attempting to create the mechanics. This des...

This was the week of the pitch, I decided to go for a single page pitch document as I felt I could get all of my ideas down in a single place which would make my presentation easier for me. I spent a lot of time in-engine trying to mechanically build a playable version of the level I had already mapped out on paper. The game concept was originally a simple parkour game, similar to games such as Vector. But with each reaction to obstacles being tackled with a different use of the single button. Short-press for a jump, long-press to grab onto ledges, double-tap to use jump pads and a triple-tap to roll through breakable obstacles. After my pitch, Rhoda and Pete raised some very valid points about the overuse of this kind of game and that I wasn’t necessarily adding anything new to the concept. Reflection: I felt a little annoyed with myself for falling into design pitfall number 1: don’t fall in love with your first idea. While I didn’t plan on completely scrapping the idea, I kno...

So it begins! For this first project I decided to take a look at a top down level design I did as part of a brief from first year. This design was basic and lacking, but I felt like it had something in its bones that I could work from. I decided that it would work well as a stealth game as there are plenty of points of entry giving players lots of options to approach the level. I then spent some time furthering and developing the design to meet my current standards. This design felt more substantial and like I'd be able to work in great deatail with the overall gameplay. Over the next week I'll be spending time on the blockout and doing research on gameplay for stealth games.