So, anyone out there who is up for a new game challenge?
Yes? Then let’s play “Rise” created by Deathspike Entertainment.
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How come, that me out of all people (= the biggest loser ever when it comes to playing games 😉 ) posts a game link? Well, it’s because I did help develop it.
Last summer semester we had a game development course “Project competence multimedia: Unreal Development” where we were told to make our own game in altogether two to three months.
I made a lot of interesting experiences in these few months of the project – some encouraging, some absolute frustrating. So I decided to share a few of them.
We started our course with a few hours of learning the basics about UDK and Maya (yes, you read that right, we learned a lot of Maya- stuff (polymodeling, texturing, shading) in just three/four hours – I really didn’t envy the guys without foreknowledge). After that, our course instructor announced (more or less) randomly the project leader among us and we split up in different groups with different focus areas.
Because I did the course voluntarily and besides exams also had my bachelor thesis to deal with, I chose my well-known Maya territory. Yes, well at least I thought well-known.
But let’s take a step back. Before starting to develop, we first had to discuss which kind of game we wanted to create. Because most games were either too expensive or simple not doable, we decided on a Jump ‘n’ Run game. After two weeks of brainstorming and discussion we also had our storyline.
“A hero who is banned into the underworld and can only escape by climbing upwards a huge tower, but because this tower is damaged, he must first collect little aids to achieve the unachievable. He always encounters dangers and finally meets the one who sent him into his worst nightmares.“
After creating a first list of models that weren’t provided by the UDK library, the Maya team came to its first use. For assigning a model to one of the team members we used Redmine – a flexible project management web application – who allowed us to create “tickets” for each model and tracking, so the process, comments, pictures, time etc. of each.
Full of vim and vigor I started my first model – a bouncing pad. Well, it took not that long to finish and I was quickly at the point where I could export it (via fbx-export), just to suffer a surprise – most materials that I used couldn’t be exported by fbx. So, back to texturing and shading (with a google search previously) and using only lamberts and blinns this time. Next surprise, don’t use two materials for one object. Okay, got it.
Just as I finally got the model into UDK, we all recognized that we also needed collision models as well as light maps – again straight back to Maya. For my first two models I still did this manually, afterwards we got lucky and our course instructor wrote a Maya Plugin which did it automatically (at least a simple one which was mostly enough).
Experience number I: Don’t forget learning something about a new software before you start doing things for it or: approach your work thought-out.
My next experience concerns more the group process than my personal work. We had a few issues with misunderstandings or deadline violations, mostly because we didn’t have the best communication between the teams (Maya, UDK, Scripting, Cinematic, Sound). This resulted in wrong sized or differently executed than expected models. The whole situation improved after we developed a workflow, where at different points, a feedback from the other group was a must.
Experience number II: Create a workflow from the beginning to avoid misunderstandings and therefore waste of time and frustration.
Against to the early planning, we decided to implement the third person perspective during the whole game, which ended with the requirement to have a character. Because I had already modeled one for my bachelor thesis, I offered to use it instead of invest the time for a new one. Well, but as we remember experience number I – what works in Maya doesn’t automatically work in UDK. So, also here back to shading and texturing.
The last big part of the project for me was creating animations for our hero. It was also one of the most frustrating experiences (perhaps even in my life). My character already had a skeleton and control rig, which – how else could It be – couldn’t be used for the UDK import. We tried different new skeletons and ended up with exporting the UDK skeleton to Maya (it’s really strange when you apply a skeleton for a character plus weapon to only a character) which also didn’t solve our problems. Because the end of our project time approached and I got caught up in the final steps for my bachelor thesis, we dropped the idea of creating our own animation and used the default animations from UDK.
Experience number III: Don’t assume that all your Maya stuff also works in UDK or: Sometimes it’s better to start from scratch than invest endless time in adjusting some things that are already existing.
Experience number IV: Really consider doing a time consuming project if you already have a hell of a lot work to do.
The last steps were the sound effects and background music as well as the narrator and his text. I wasn’t part of this team but could catch a glimpse into the recording studio (of our university) during the recording.
Nevertheless, I think we got a presentable result for a not even three month long project and with a group of greenhorns 😉
You can download the second level of the game or just have a look at the speedrun of first and second level here.