Sunday 22 March 2015

Talking to a Caterpillar



This week I textured the Duchess’ House, here it is below:





I believe I managed to create a stylised looking building with saturated colours with a slightly painterly feel. I exaggerated the textures more than I intended because the house is a little bit set back in the level, you don’t get very close to it so it’s exaggerated so that you can see the large detail. If I get more time later on I might change the colour or value of the roof tiles, they’re too similar to the cobblestone I feel.



The rest of the week I spent creating the branching conversation with the caterpillar. Like before with the puzzle, this was just very long days working in blue prints getting this conversation to work.



It’s setup in a similar to the previous puzzle except I’m toggling the visibility of text rather than moving it into a place. The conversation isn’t exactly branching, we wanted to give the player the illusion of choice so we made a conversation where the player can choose one of three answers. Each answer doesn’t affect how the Caterpillar responds, the answers were chosen from the text and put together so that whatever the player chooses the conversation still makes sence.



The blueprint is pretty complex, here is the zoomed out version:




It’s all toggling visibility and setting variables so that you cannot accidentally activate the wrong conversation at ANY POINT, I spent a very long time mashing all the keys on the keyboard during the conversation to make sure nothing silly like last time could happen.




As I went along I learned certain things about blueprints, for instance after making several portions of the blueprint like the one below, I worked out that I could replace the parts highlighted in yellow above
with a single “Disable Input” which made the blueprint smaller and tidier.

Sunday 15 March 2015

The Duchess' House



This week I designed and modelled the Duchess’ House, originally we were thinking of the player being able to go through the house, but to cut back on the level we decided for it to be in the background of a forest area.




Originally the house was going to be a small cottage, I didn’t really put a whole lot of design work into it, I just went ahead with a mesh for a basic looking cottage. I then got some critique from a friend and he did a paintover of what I sent him and he showed me a much stronger design.





So I looked at this and see how I could push it further, I concepted lots of models in 3ds Max, here are some of them:





 














With some of these I went a bit too over the top and it stopped looking like a house and more like a factory, so I dialled it back a bit and ended up with this mesh:




I’m really glad I got critique on my design now, it took me a lot longer than expected to get to the unwrapping stage, but I now have a much stronger design to move forward with in texturing which I’ll start next week.

Saturday 7 March 2015

Glitches Ruining Everything



At  the start of this week I thought I’d spend perhaps another day on the puzzle I began last week and have that done and out of the way. I was very, very wrong.



So I started adding the finishing touches to the puzzle, gave it an end and then started just testing it over and over to find any glitches. I found a wonderful glitch that after you eat the cake, if you so choose to press the space bar to jump you will jump for a very long time as if wonderland just lost a lot of gravity.



I couldn’t understand what was going on, I looked over the blueprint several times to make sure I didn’t accidentally change the gravity upon pressing E in the eat cake collision box (I didn’t). I spend hours looking online to see if anyone was getting the same problem. I tried changing parts of the blueprint to see if I could fix it but then more problems came up. Parts of the puzzle were being activated prematurely; meshes were being brought into the room before the player entered the collision boxes.



I found the solution when I deleted the blueprint entirely and started from scratch in a sub level blueprint. Unfortunately this whole ordeal took up my whole week. I’m finding it hard to stay motivated creating blueprints, it feels as if I’m doing so little even though I’m working all through the day until labs shut. Next week I’m passing the engine file over again so I’ll get a chance to do some modelling, which will be nice.