Everything is coming together!

Luke and I did voice acting! It was a fun afternoon, but we decided to voice the two characters that speak during the inciting Scene with me voicing the father to the hero and Luke voicing Aether (This is one of those things I get to tease Luke about years later hehe)

Despite several set backs and cuts, the team has managed to come together and we are happy with the prototype we have produced, we’ve set our final goals and deadlines for each member.

The gameplay is in a good spot, so between now and the deadline I will be focusing mainly on:
– Assisting Florim with the Big Cutscene at the end and making sure all the cutscenes are tuned with minor details (voices, sounds, animals etc)
– Overworld AI: Passive and Aggressive
– Creating a walkthrough video going through the game from start to finish.
– Mechanics Design document explaining the gameplay and its relation to the narrative
– miscellaneous documents
The team is on track for a good submission across the board, this project has been good for personally, doing a story over gameplay project is new for me and I managed to get a ton of practice with the Unreal engine.

Overall a lot of progress has been made, we decided to cut a major portion of the forest section as the goal of the demo was to reach about 10 minutes, and the forest was not the the exciting part of the inciting incident. We’re getting closer to the deadline and it was very important that we got the player to the major cutscene between Aether and their Father.

How an encounter works, the player in the overworld collides with an enemy, then both the player and the enemy get teleported to the battlefield instance.
A little detail I added is the objective bar, since this is a prototype a lot of context is missing, so it’ll be good for the player to have clear instructions on what to do.

Lately I have also been creating several scripted actors and enablers for Florim to use in his cinematics. For example; the opening cinematic was quite dull so I created fake actors for a Fox, Crow and Aether, so that they may appear in the shots and be played/animated with.

I decided to add opening credits to the prototype, hopefully we’ll use this space to give a small bit of story background to explain why the player starts where they do. I’ve also left space for subtitles inside the same blueprint. I’ll need to revisit these later when the big cutscene is completed, but for now its only in the intro.

We now have the core combat working in the game. We imported the main character and a few creatures that will act as early enemies to fight.

Planned list of Enemies:
-Training Dummy (won’t fight back, used for tutorial)
-Fox (forests)
-Crow (forests)
-Fire demon (These attack the town and are aggressive)
-Bear Boss (for the end of the second forest part)

Right now I am working inside my own workspace within the unreal project to avoid files conflicts with Florim. Very soon we’ll be combining our scenes so that the gameplay and cinematics can exist in the same space. Hopefully if we have enough time, I want to give the monsters in the overworld 2 different AI types; Passive monsters won’t try to force combat with the player and will just roam, and aggressive monsters that will chase the player upon seeing them.

Our team submitted a script for the inciting incident part of our story, in a gameplay-cutscene-gameplay format. For additional measure we also created a storyboard to go alongside this with several visual references to help visualise the story.

We got the feedback back and we were told several points:
– We needed to create the character names earlier; having them set out means we can commit to them.
– Female anatomy needs to be considered when choosing models, our visual reference for an important female character was too stylised and wasn’t realistic to to what limits a female body can push. Models that push anatomy boundaries (such as men with impossible muscles) always run the risk of causing dysmorphic feelings in players.
-The storyboard wasn’t understood and was encouraged to be kept within the team to explain points of reference
-Dialogue in a script needs to be in bold

Apart from these points, the lecturer was happy with the script and direction our team was headed.

It turns out there is not much material on turn based combat in regards to Unreal. So I am currently experimenting with different methods of approach.

There has been a few changes to the requirements of the project; we now need to focus on the inciting incident within our story. This should make things easier for us, however some of our later game concepts will not be realised in the submission.

The Unreal project is still in its early stages. Luke has been hard at work to iterate the story beats and we have been talking back and forth to flesh out ideas.

The plan for the next 2 weeks: I have got to get an early prototype of the game play ready. Admittedly I miss working with the Unity engine, but I need to get better at using Unreal, that’s my main challenge.

For the script due on the 26th, we planned to also create a storyboard to go beside it, this is the equivalent of us creating an early prototype last project for the concept review, however this time a storyboard is a better prototyping of the script. If enough time, we’ll add voices, sounds and directions for it.

With the Mobile game out of the way, we now have started to plan the narrative game. Luke has come up with an overall story set in a medieval setting. Its constantly going through several iterations as it gets shaped to fit within the Hero’s journey guidelines.

In terms of gameplay, we are considering a classical RPG style core gameplay loop to connect the story together. This way we can put even more emphasis on the companion characters strengths, so that when the hero reaches their lowest point and their companions leave him, he becomes weak in battle too.

Github and Trello have been set up for the project, I will be focusing on the gameplay programming, whereas Florim will be focusing on the cinematic programming. This way we shouldn’t encounter many merging difficulties.