GameJam/Classroom Reflection

Introduction:

The purpose of this blog is to go through the different experiences i had whilst making the classroom, and whilst participating in the Game jam. This blog will be breaking both sections down and explaining what it took to create them, the process in which we made them, and how we felt about what we made at the end. (Screenshots provided as well to show progress)

The purpose of this blog will be for me to show how my time was in level design whilst using Unreal 5. I enjoyed the experiences I had, though it was certainly hard as i needed to get myself used to the new version of Unreal.

 

Recreating the Classroom in Unreal:

There were a lot of different steps involved in recreating the classroom in unreal 5. The first step was needing to grey box the room and the more basic shapes in the room which I could then add textures to later. In the first screenshot is the grey boxed room with some very basic textures on the tables and floor. I then added some more detailed parts of the room, this includes the cable pipes going around the classroom, some placeholders for where the bottom windows would be, and then the roof windows, which I just made using a glass texture. I struggled to find a texture for the wall but eventually settled on one, I then got the 3D models off Dylan, and added some of the chair models to the room, having them in different positions at the desks. I then did the same thing with mouse and keyboard models that he’d made, placing them on the desks and having them in slightly different positions to make it more accurate. I then went around the room and started importing more of the 3D models to add to the finer details of the room, for example the lights hanging from the ceiling, the correct sized door, the right sized windows at the front etc. I also took time to properly texture the rest of the room, that being the ceiling and the lower parts of the walls. Finally, I replaced any placeholders I had, putting down the proper window models and doing some tweaking with the textures on different models around the room.

One of the main issued I faced as soon as I started is that I was told of 2 ways I could create the room. The first was by using BSP, and the other by a modelling tool I had not used before. I went to use the modelling tool, but this only turned out to be a pain as the textures would come outstretched on it instead of smooth and repeating like it does on BSP. So, about halfway through my game I had to re-do the walls in BSP to get the textures to look correct on them. Although this took a lot of time, it did come out looking a lot better.

Another big issue I had was finding the correct textures. On sites like ambient cg and withpoly, I couldn’t find any textures which really had the colours that I wanted, none of them had the sort of cream/beige colour that is on the walls of the classroom. So, I just ended up using some very basic textures as placeholder, and eventually found a site in which I could take a picture of the wall/desk, and then turn it into a texture. It didn’t look a lot better but got the right colour after a while of trying.

A challenge I had to face early was being realistic of how much detail I was going to do for the room. This classroom has a lot of details when you’re looking at the walls and seeing all the different bits of pipes, the posters and wall textures. So, I had to sort of pick and choose at the start and see what I could really do in the time that we were given. I wanted to do a lot more than I did, but I didn’t realise how long those smaller details on the walls and ceiling would take me. I got over this by prioritising the details I would do in terms of importance to the room. So, I did as much as I could in the time that we had.

A minor challenge I had was waiting for Dylan to send the 3D models to me, I would find myself waiting for a while before any of the models were done, though this wasn’t too much of an issue as within a day or two I had the models I needed and it was a matter of exporting them as .fbx’s so I could use them.

When reflecting on what I learned, I learned that I do really enjoy grey boxing and creating these sorts of environments. I learned that I need to get better with finding textures, and maybe investigate into finding more websites which could help me get the textures I need, since this was something, I wasted a lot of time on. I also learned that it’s a lot hard than I thought to do this, but that also could’ve been because I was learning Unreal 5 for the first time. I think me and Dylan worked well as a team, he provided really good 3D models, with the only issue being it took a while before I got them.

 

Game Jam Participation:

My experience in this game jam was really enjoyable, it taught me a lot about time constraints and how when being a game dev, you really have to be dedicated to making a game within a short amount of time. It just proved to me how hard something like this can actually be. The theme of the jam was Nuts and Bolts, so me and the rest of the team had some ideas, though had to consider how hard it would be to do within a week. We thought that we could do something with enemy AI and attacking, but soon realised it would definitely be too much for the time we had. So, we settled on a basic parkour and collection game instead.  The game we created was going to be based in a sort of Steampunk like factory, this way we could incorporate the theme of the Game Jam, into the background itself. The point of the game was to go around the factory and avoid obstacles whilst collecting Nuts, Bolts and gears which will give you different points. Get the highest number of points within the time limit, the time increasing by 10 for every 10 points you get. We were going to add enemies which you could defeat to access areas with more points, but we never got around to implementing the idea due to time constraints.

My role within the team was to deal with creating the environment and map, aka the factory that the game would take place in. Will was drawing the art and doing animations for the game, and cam was doing most of the coding for the game. I started off by grey boxing some smaller ideas, before eventually landing on it being a 2D/3D slide scroller. So I created a grey box for the map and decided to have it as a pretty open map, with lots of platforms to allow for different mechanics to be added later in development. For example, we had a dash added, up-wards dash and a wall jump/climb which were eventually added. We also used the M O S C O W system to put what we needed to do into sections of importance: Must have: Should have: Could have:

There were a lot of memorable moments and challenges we faced, the biggest one being what we realistically thought we could even achieve in a week. We had this whole big idea when we started, only to realise there was no chance at all that we were going to get it done, so we had to dumb it down a lot and even remove certain mechanics. We had a lot of moments of trying to understand how unreal 5 actually worked. Me and cam were very used to using Unreal 4, so switching to 5 was pretty rough and we had many moments of us trying to figure out what the equivalent code from 4 to 5 was. Another challenge we faced was refining the mechanics with our character, the jumping/dashing mechanics felt very floaty, so we ended up doing a lot of tweaking and changing of things like gravity and jump speed. We had to do this a lot for developing the wall jump mechanic as well. I faced some issues whilst I was creating the environment, as I wasn’t used to creating something in a 2D platformer style. Though I eventually structured out what I wanted the player to go through and created the map in a left to right format. The left side being easier and getting harder as you go to the right.

 

Reflection on Learning Process:

Both the Game jam and development of the classroom have given me a lot of insight on how 3D and 2D environments are created within Unreal 5. Doing both of theses has helped me a lot to learn the new engine, and to understand how I should prioritise myself whilst creating an environment. For example, what I should be focusing on during the development, which can be easily done by using M O S C O W. I think the most valuable lesson I learnt was getting better at categorising what I need to do within certain time constraints. When being a game dev, you are going to want to get the more important things done first and out of the way, doing both has helped me to learn that and is a skill I’m going to need. I still need to learn some tricks to help me speed up with my environment creation, but once I have those skills, I will be able to implement them into what I make.

 

Suggestions for Improvement:

With both projects that I’ve done, I would say my biggest critique on myself is not being quick enough when developing them. Given that I was learning as new engine it’s understandable, though if I was quicker with creating and adding details to the classroom and the game jam, I think we could have gotten a lot more done. For example, I never got around to fully texturing everything I wanted to within the Game jam, I think because of that it made the game look a lot worse and unfinished it a lot of different ways. I need to get better at using my time well and being faster with my choices when creating environments and giving them the needed detail to help them come to life. I understand this is the point of a game jam, but if I could enhance the experience, I would say release the theme you have to base your game off maybe 1 or 2 days before the actual jam starts. This gives the people participating actual time to think of what they wanted to do, then giving them the full week or set number of days to make it. I think this was an issue because we spent an entire day thinking of our idea and getting it down to something make-able within the time given.

 

Conclusion:

I really enjoyed these past experiences despite the struggles I’ve had during the development of them. It’s allowed me to work with different people in my class and has been enjoyable overall. It has helped to peak my interest in getting good with Unreal 5. I want to be able to create environments whilst I’m at home to further my interest into this career and that’s likely what I’m going to start doing now. Once I’m able to download Unreal 5 onto my PC, I will create levels outside of college to work on my skills.

Images are here: 

First 6 are Classroom

Last 4 are my Level