[UDK] Learning & Developing my first game
So, my name is Daniel, a 24yr old brazilian 3D Artist. I traveled to Vancouver Canada to learn 3D Animation on the Vancouver Film School, and finished the program about a year ago. Other than some freelance work, didn't had really much work experience in the area, but I always enjoy doing little projects to learn more and improve my skills.
As many here, I'm a gamer, and I love games. And recently one freelance job I got had me getting my animation into UDK for rendering. UDK impressed me with it's ease of use, in a few days I already could create matinee sequences and simple scenes.
As I studied more of it, I started creating simple levels on UDK for fun. I put some of these levels available online and people seemed to enjoy it so I started to wonder if I would be able to create a simple game myself with that engine.
And that's how my Unrealscript learning journey starts. I bought a copy of "Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide" and on the second day reading I started trying to change the code taught there to do something different. Instead of a top-down camera decided to try and get a sidescroller camera working. As I started to find problems I stumbled upon Epic's UDK forum, with TONS of documentation, tutorials and helpful people. 3 days into learning I got the sidescroller camera, a simple melee attacking system and a melee enemy spawner.
At this point, I was decided to take this little learning project further and actually make some art and a completed level with a objective. I had my "main gameplay elements" working (even if a little bit clunky in this start =x) so I felt good enough to try and make some art for it.
Story-wise, I thought of making little/young elemental/titans, that wake up from their rest to find their home/nature threatened by a corruption force and have to fight this corruption-spawned enemies to purify their world.
Thinking back to what I learned on Vancouver Film School when creating my Short Film, I decided to set my goal small and doable. I will create 1 level, with 1 playable character and 3 enemy-types (That will only differ from one another by small details). I'll also add some Kismet-driven puzzles, that I did before on the UDK Levels I created for other games and I know I can execute. If I manage to complete the prototype how I want, and it's fun and enjoyable, I can think of expanding upon and creating more characters, enemies and levels.
With that in mind, I decided to concept some elementals, to decide which one could be my first character for this prototype. I'm not so great with drawing, but I just wanted to put some ideas out there.
I ended up deciding on creating the Ice elemental first (Middle drawing), as a snow/ice environment tends to need less assets (at least I believe so... Mountains, Rocks, Trees, logs, maybe some snow-covered ruins...).
I like to concept the shape of the character in ZBrush first using ZSpheres, then do a Retopo, instead of starting with a basemesh created somewhere else. So I did a quick concept for my IceGuy without much attention to details, just the basic shapes
Afterwards, retopo'd,UV'd and started to work on the textures. I wanted to experiment with hand-painted textures. 10 Minutes after starting to paint his texture, I noticed I was terrible at it. My girlfriend seeing my struggle offered some help, and turns out she's quite good at this.
She painted his textures and he ended up looking even better than I expected. But his face was looking kinda dull. Started rigging him to get him in the game and in the process decided to add some bones to the face to get some more expressiveness out of him.
Now I quite enjoy this character and his cartoony style
with the rig ready, decided to make some quick animations for him to finally see him in action in-game.
At this point I learned something else... Animation for games is different, and there are other things that must be considered. In an attack animation I also have to think about the place/socket that the game will trace to check if the damage happens. Right now with this placeholder animation it's really hard to actually hit an enemy with one of the punches, while it's easier to get the sword attack to hit, when I get back to create the final attack animations I'll have to recreate them with that in mind. The animation must not only look good, but play good.
I also modeled him a Icy-sword, this time I painted the texture for it myself (With some guidance from my girl XD) got both in the game and tried to create a special material for him that would sell better the idea that he is made of ice.
Now that he needed something to kill, I decided to make an enemy to play with him. this time I helped a lot more on the texture-painting process, but while I am in fact improving on this, my girlfriend still ended up doing most of the heavy-lifting on that front xD
I just finished a simple rig for him, but still haven't animated him. I also need to create a weapon for him and then I'll finally start to work on the level
This has been a great learning experience for me and I'm excited to hear feedback from you guys. I'll keep on posting updates on the process, and hopefully soon enough I'll have something playable to share ^^
The intent for this project is learning. I'm not worried about publishing, future, or etc. Right now in my mind this is a learning project. If it ends up being fun and I see that it can be something more, great. But for now all I really want is to learn other parts of game development and be able to create something playable and potentially fun
Well, I guess that's it for now, thanks for reading ^^
As many here, I'm a gamer, and I love games. And recently one freelance job I got had me getting my animation into UDK for rendering. UDK impressed me with it's ease of use, in a few days I already could create matinee sequences and simple scenes.
As I studied more of it, I started creating simple levels on UDK for fun. I put some of these levels available online and people seemed to enjoy it so I started to wonder if I would be able to create a simple game myself with that engine.
And that's how my Unrealscript learning journey starts. I bought a copy of "Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide" and on the second day reading I started trying to change the code taught there to do something different. Instead of a top-down camera decided to try and get a sidescroller camera working. As I started to find problems I stumbled upon Epic's UDK forum, with TONS of documentation, tutorials and helpful people. 3 days into learning I got the sidescroller camera, a simple melee attacking system and a melee enemy spawner.
At this point, I was decided to take this little learning project further and actually make some art and a completed level with a objective. I had my "main gameplay elements" working (even if a little bit clunky in this start =x) so I felt good enough to try and make some art for it.
Story-wise, I thought of making little/young elemental/titans, that wake up from their rest to find their home/nature threatened by a corruption force and have to fight this corruption-spawned enemies to purify their world.
Thinking back to what I learned on Vancouver Film School when creating my Short Film, I decided to set my goal small and doable. I will create 1 level, with 1 playable character and 3 enemy-types (That will only differ from one another by small details). I'll also add some Kismet-driven puzzles, that I did before on the UDK Levels I created for other games and I know I can execute. If I manage to complete the prototype how I want, and it's fun and enjoyable, I can think of expanding upon and creating more characters, enemies and levels.
With that in mind, I decided to concept some elementals, to decide which one could be my first character for this prototype. I'm not so great with drawing, but I just wanted to put some ideas out there.
I ended up deciding on creating the Ice elemental first (Middle drawing), as a snow/ice environment tends to need less assets (at least I believe so... Mountains, Rocks, Trees, logs, maybe some snow-covered ruins...).
I like to concept the shape of the character in ZBrush first using ZSpheres, then do a Retopo, instead of starting with a basemesh created somewhere else. So I did a quick concept for my IceGuy without much attention to details, just the basic shapes
Afterwards, retopo'd,UV'd and started to work on the textures. I wanted to experiment with hand-painted textures. 10 Minutes after starting to paint his texture, I noticed I was terrible at it. My girlfriend seeing my struggle offered some help, and turns out she's quite good at this.
She painted his textures and he ended up looking even better than I expected. But his face was looking kinda dull. Started rigging him to get him in the game and in the process decided to add some bones to the face to get some more expressiveness out of him.
Now I quite enjoy this character and his cartoony style
with the rig ready, decided to make some quick animations for him to finally see him in action in-game.At this point I learned something else... Animation for games is different, and there are other things that must be considered. In an attack animation I also have to think about the place/socket that the game will trace to check if the damage happens. Right now with this placeholder animation it's really hard to actually hit an enemy with one of the punches, while it's easier to get the sword attack to hit, when I get back to create the final attack animations I'll have to recreate them with that in mind. The animation must not only look good, but play good.
I also modeled him a Icy-sword, this time I painted the texture for it myself (With some guidance from my girl XD) got both in the game and tried to create a special material for him that would sell better the idea that he is made of ice.
Now that he needed something to kill, I decided to make an enemy to play with him. this time I helped a lot more on the texture-painting process, but while I am in fact improving on this, my girlfriend still ended up doing most of the heavy-lifting on that front xD
I just finished a simple rig for him, but still haven't animated him. I also need to create a weapon for him and then I'll finally start to work on the level
This has been a great learning experience for me and I'm excited to hear feedback from you guys. I'll keep on posting updates on the process, and hopefully soon enough I'll have something playable to share ^^
The intent for this project is learning. I'm not worried about publishing, future, or etc. Right now in my mind this is a learning project. If it ends up being fun and I see that it can be something more, great. But for now all I really want is to learn other parts of game development and be able to create something playable and potentially fun
Well, I guess that's it for now, thanks for reading ^^
Replies
Really inspiring dude. I look forward to watching your project evolve.
All the best with it. Good luck!
Thanks, makes me happy to see that someone liked reading it ^^
So, I was thinking, and I decided to instead of starting doing a "ice titan" campaign level, I could do even less for a functional prototype... I could do a simple Arena with waves of monsters of increasing difficulty. That would let me make only 1 small environment, and test the combat/gameplay that is the core mechanic of the game, effectively having something "Playable" to test.
So I made some modular assets for the arena
Started UVing and texturing it, painted a brick wall (This time I painted it myself, without help from the lady ;] ) And I'm actually happy with the result
I set up the basics of it on the editor just to see how it's looking
Tomorrow I shall continue UVing and texturing the pieces, and populate the map a little more. ^^
I'm finally getting happy with it, would love to hear some feedback ^^ there are still some things I want to do on it (Specially add some Enemy audience cheering XD) But for now I guess I'll take a break from it and work on the actual gameplay.
Cheers ^^
Thanks ^^ It was a pain to texture everything but at least was worth it. I don't usually like the stuff I do but this one I actually think it's looking good xD
Yesterday I created a new enemy, a kind of evil blob/slime (think it makes sense with the corruption idea).
He doesn't have any fancy texture, just threw on him a material with a fresnel, and it kinda looks interesting xD maybe I'll paint a texture for him afterwards and multiply on the fresnel
Rigging him was funny, since he's only a "head", added some joints for facial control, he can go pretty crazy xD
Did some placeholder animations to get him in game, cracks me up everytime he attacks me with his tongue xD
Now I get someone to play with me on the arena
In that regard, also made a bigger badass version of the blob by changing his material and scale, 1 of those start spawning after second wave, and also scales each wave.
Getting excited
Well, that's it for now ^^ Thanks for the kind words homrighausen3d and Lankus Maximus, it's nice to know I'm not just talking to myself here xD
I've been working pretty hardcore last 3 days on the Programming side of things (the side I'm still quite bad at, but I'm improving xD) It's been a slow and frustrating process, but I finally got the attack system implemented the way I wanted ^^
So, here's a video of how the game is playing so far:
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Don't mind the animations, I still have to work a lot on them, I'm just trying just to get some thing passable done quick to test the system. Once I get everything in place I'll go back and do some proper polish on them ;x
Thinking of doing the HUD next, from what I've been studying around the internet, I need to learn Scaleform... A bit scared of that, but we'll see how that goes
If there is anything you would like to know about the project, or the process of doing any of this stuff =x I would love to comment on it/show more, let me know ^^
Thanks again for the feedback \o
This can add a lot of visual effects with low development time ...
Hm, do you mean a particle spawning when a hit connect or the material of the enemy flashing red or something else or both? XD
I tried to add the particle spawning but for some reason it's not spawning on the right place always, sometimes it spawns on the right spot, sometimes it doesn't =x maybe I'll ask around the UDK forums and see if someone can point out what I'm doing wrong on that xD
Well, I already knew most of the art-related stuff because of previous projects xD and I'm not willing to learn everything... I won't touch music, I simply don't have the skill for that, when the game gets to a point where a "releasable" playable prototype is in sight I'll look for someone to do music for it xD
Well, I had this art update... A new ranged enemy, evolved from the original Blob. Also a new texture that my lady did for the Blob character, with actual eyes... It made him more cute... Not sure if that's good or not... still deciding, lol.
Well, this are the news on the game, and how it's playing right now:
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Got 2 more days till the Deadline for the festival, trying to finish up the enemy and fix some more stuff ^^
Otherwise good job! Love the art style you have going
Also, I agree with shrogg that the hits don't feel great, but that's probably just the lack of sound. You should try that Legend of Zelda trick of having a tiny pause whenever a hit lands, or perhaps just whenever you deal a fatal blow to an enemy, I know UDK has time dilation functions already built in so it'd be a swift thing to prototype.
The gestures your guy makes when he attacks are a bit wrist-heavy, and that makes the weapon look really light, and subsequently makes us read the attacks as powerless. They remind me a bit of the attacks from HoM&M2. He should have to pull weight through his whole body to draw that blade through enemies.
That is some really great feedback/suggestions, thanks a lot for that ^^
I changed the camera a bit trying to follow your suggestion, this is how the camera is looking now:
I see what you mean about the attack animations, I really need to spend a lot more time on those... I just did some quick ones as placeholders, I hope they'll look better and give more of the "hit feeling" once I get back to them ^^ I'll keep in mind what you said about putting his body weight through to the attacks.
There is one, I guess I need to add more to it XD
Thanks guys ^^ I'm going for a cartoony/cute look, very excited to start doing the "Story" levels I'm planning to do.
Today was the deadline for the Brazilian Indie Games Festival I'm sending this prototype to.
They ask the developers to make 2 videos for the submission, 1 showing/explaining the game and a smaller teaser of the game (30 seconds)
So, here are the videos ^^ (Did a little matinee intro for the teaser one)
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This explanation one is in portuguese, but I made subtitles for it ^^ just click on CC and select english.
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Also made a steam Greenlight Concept page to post updates about the game ^^ (Concept Page, not Greenlight for reals XD just concept)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=164452372&searchtext=
Worked a lot more on the programming side of things, not really much artistic updates
Btw, yesterday was exactly 1 month since I started developing this project
So I decided to upload a video with unedited footage of a full Arena Wave, with bugs and all ^^ It's going to be interesting to look back at this video in the future and see how the game was at the 1 month mark
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What do you think of the impacts now? I added some particle effects, camera shake and also included some time dilation as KartoonHead suggested