Art Us Eval

8/9/2019 Art Us Eval

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ARTUS MODULE EVALUATION

Artus was a project that took almost a year to complete. In that time, my ideas on how

Artus should look, work, feel and even the core story changed dramatically numerous times.

One of my first biggest challenges was deciding which engine to go for. I knew that I wanted

to do it in the Unreal3 engine; it was perfect for the job in every way, but which version. At

the start I had UT3 and GoW versions to choose from, in the end I decided to go with GoW

because it was built primarily for single player levels which my game was. It offered me far

more assets such as speech files, Kismet operations and even meshes.

However, as the week that I started building my map in GoW, Epic decided to release UDK

to the public, the latest version of the engine, complete with Lightmass, a new content

browser, a far superior and stable core engine and numerous other changes. As well as that,

Epic continually update UDK pretty much every month, which meant as time went by I

would have more and more assets. I was back at square one again, I had to choose between

UDK and GoW and I would have to stick with that choice for a year.

Again, I ultimately decided to stick with GoW, this was because of a number of reasons.

Firstly, I wasnt aware how good UDK was at the time. Secondly, UDK required the user to

make most of their assets, something I didnt have time to do. GoW just had pretty much

everything I needed in one editor. Looking back, I would have liked to gone with UDK and

pushed myself to create everything, however, to cater for my need to work with UDK, I

made a few maps later on in the year in it and used the experience I learnt by making them

in making my GoW map better.

In this document Ill explain how I got my game to the state its in now, the challenges I

came up against and how I overcame them. Ill show some of my methods the kind of

testing I got and show how the game works. Ill then finish off my giving myself a self

evaluation including writing about how I could improve the game and where I see it going in

the future if it were to be actually made.

1 PROBLEM SOLVING AND METHODS OF WORKING.

Throughout Artus I came up against a fair amount of problems in different areas, ranging

from materials in the game engine to unwrapping models in Max. All of these I overcame

though and each problem increased my knowledge and confidence further.

EYES OF A DESIGNER


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One of my first problems I came up against was actually starting the map. I know this might

seem like a daft problem but I think its a big problem that everyone has when starting out

as a designer. I must have tried starting Artus about 5 or 6 times, each time I spent a few

hours on it before starting again, the problem was I just couldnt envision what the end

product would look like.

UNLIT MODE

Unlit mode is probably a designers worst enemy, it just rapes the eyes. But, chances are,

youll be working in unlit mode for the first few hours unless you have a seriously good idea

where the lighting is coming from. Of course, if its day light you will have sunlight, but

sometimes that is even worse to use because it gives such a contrast between the sunlight

and the shadows, especially without any bounced lighting.

Eventually, I stuck with an idea, a few hours later once I had added my first batch of lights I

felt a lot better. Unlit mode only shows the diffuse channel, so being able to see the normals

and specular for once really gave my eyes a holiday. You get a much better feel for the map

and the end product.

I feel that this problem can only be overcome by experience. Ive created roughly 6 or 7

maps to date, and its only recently Ive found Im comfortable starting a new map, but its

still a daunting experience. Sometimes Ill work with a point light in the vicinity, but I find

that sometimes skews your perception and you build around the light instead of the final

image.

WATER WATER EVERYWHERE

Because some of the game is based outside in the rain, I had to come up with a way to make

the materials fit the look. Most of this was done via changing the normals and specular, but

I did make some more elaborate technical functions and materials.

RAINING DOWN THE Z

I wanted to come up with a way that would have rain always falling vertically, down the Z

axis on objects. With the current design, the rain was fixated to the material Z, not the

object Z, so depending on the material setup and the objects UV setup and world space

rotation, the rain might not always travel the right way. The first method I came up with

solve the problem of rain falling the wrong way was to use texture masks and then change

the orientation of the falling rain depending on the mask. This wasnt a very practical

solution as each object had to have its own texture mask.

Some more working around in the material editor and I came up with a flexible solution

which could be used in any material and at no extra texture dependency cost for optimalperformance.


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What this material does is firstly get the world position coordinates of the objects position

its applied to. It then masks the component input so that it remove the X, leaving just the Y

and more importantly the Z. When you do this though, the number will be huge as its the

co-ordinates in the world, so you need to multiply it by a small fraction to bring that number

down to a reasonable scale. Once youve done that, you feed it into a Panner node then

straight into the UVs of the object you want it to pan down. The size of the material is

controlled by the number you multiply it down and by masking different components, you

can get it to transverse different directions.

WET MATERIALS

Now that we have a method of making the rain always fall down a material, we needed to

make wet materials.

There is a pretty simple mechanic behind making a wet material, but each material is

different. There are a lot of different factors to take into account as well, such as materialtype and absorbency, texture reflection, grooves and other crevasses in the material etc.

One of the materials which needed careful attention was the outside floor material which

was part stone tiles, part grass clumps. The stone part had to be extra specular and

reflective as well as have water running and splashing down it. The grass on the other hand

had to just be extras specular.

Although its quite hard to see in the image below because its stationary and the normals

need to be moving to fake water, you can still see the effect. Also, I really wanted to go


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overboard on the specular to reflect the fires and lighting outside. It was just an artistic

choice which makes my level different to other games.


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Here you can see where the mask for the specular was used as a mask for the water

normals, allowing me to make water effect without it affecting the grass part.


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Again, you can see the same effect again with this material. As it was a metal texture

though, I really wanted to bring out the water splashes bouncing off the flat metal. For this,

I multiplied it instead of added then multiplied it even further to make it really stand out.

RAIN CUBES

Now all the effects were in place, I was just missing one thing...the actual rain. The rain was

produced by creating a bunch of planes, arranging them in a sporadic random fashion and

then applying a rain material to them. The rain material was a simple image of rain with a

mask for the opacity. This was then panned and made smaller.


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Although the rain cube was extremely simple, and so was the material, the material was still

transparent and therefore used high rendering costs. When applied to a bunch of planes, it

became really high, especially when that cube was in front of a bunch more cubes. I soon

discovered that having a lot of rain, if placed wrongly, can soon bring the players machine to

a halt. To counter this, I changed the cull distance for each individual cube and only usedthem where needed. By doing this, it increased rendering times by a large amount without

looking any different.

DISSOLVING

I came up with an interesting way to remove enemies from the game without them just

disappearing. The method I used was to create a material which faked the impression of

them dissolving, and then they could be destroyed without the player noticing. I later used

the material for a host of other things, such as dissolving walls and even the title UI, but the

glow didnt work properly there unfortunately.


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This was the material, pretty complex but nothing major. It had to be used with a material

instance constant, an MIC actor and a matinee scene to work though. I used it for all the

enemies in the game, and it was pretty flexible. You just needed to copy the original

material, place this before and link it to the opacity or opacity mask also. Then, you just

control the opac value via addressing the MIC in the matinee.


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VALUE OF 1

VALUE OF .7

VALUE OF .5

VALUE OF .3

VALUE OF 0

INTERACTION

Objects that could be interacted with in the world needed a way to stand out and grab the

players attention. I originally started with a particle emitter, but it never really gave the

right effect and it had to be changed to suit each objects size and location, so it wasnt the

most practical of solutions. I then moved on to a material and came up with a material that

would glow in a fractal fashion. I used this for each object that could be interacted with, and


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to reinforce the fact that this material meant an object was interactive, I made sure the first

object that had this texture on explained to the player that it was interactive.

To use the material many times in the game, as well as turn off the glow once the item had

been used I had to then make an material instance constant from the material and set it so

the glow could be turned off in Kismet.


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LEVEL STREAMING

In order to keep the level running the fastest it could and the most optimum use of system

resources, level streaming had to be extensively used to counter the large amount of

objects in the whole entire level, around 9000 in all.

To stream levels, I created the core of the games mechanics, systems and information in the

persistent level, that is, the level which is always there. Then, I built a host of other levels

and they were placed inside the persistent level, but only called upon when needed. They

could be streamed and un-streamed, you could show or hide them, and it was a really

effective way to build the map, especially when you stream the levels correctly.

I had originally had it so that when the user pressed the play button, it would say loading

while the maps loaded, however, due to the change in the main menu user interface, going

from a static texture to an actual looping matinee of a scene in the level, I had to change it

so that some of the levels actually loaded before the loading screen.


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This was the block of kismet sequences that ran to make level streaming work. As you can

see, some of them are fired from remote events and those remote events originate in other

levels other than the persistent level. So using the persistent level as a HUB system for

relaying all your map functions really helps.


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THE WEATHER AND AMBIENCE


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This kismet sequence shows you how I set up the ambient sounds around the city. I used asimilar setup for the lightning with the random occasion selection sequence, but I expanded

upon it to pick either a scream or another ambient noise such as gunshots or an explosion. I

also picked the largest and deepest explosion and built on that to include a camera shake

which would make the player feel like an explosion had gone off in their vicinity. As its

random, it sometimes picks great times to fire, such as when theyre extremely alert,

walking down an empty corridor. Other times it goes off during an arena fight and the

player wouldnt even notice it.

I created a sound cue for the screams themselves as I found it gave me a lot more controland also a lot more variety. Each scream has a certain pitch and volume that it can be, giving

it the illusion of more than one scram per actual scream. I also set up a priority system so

the most blood curdling of screams occurred the least, making them really stand out.

Weather was another factor that I wanted to get across, especially while the player is

outside. I felt, that for this type of game and especially this type of level and story, that

thunder and lightning plus rain in the dark were the most effective archetypes. The lightning

went through many different stages of prototyping trying to get the best result without

compromising performance. I originally started with 4 directional lights, setting them to

dynamic and then attaching them to a variable loop in Kismet. This worked fine when the


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level was fairly bare, as time went on though; it brought the game to its knees. So I decided

to redesign, and after a lot of different methods, I finally came to the best method that gave

me the best performance. I decided to use a directional light again but just a single one and I

made it not cast shadows. To solve the problem of it going through the buildings I used a

light exclusion volume. I also removed the light after the player had been locked inside sothat it didnt waste any valuable resources.

This image was the entire weather and lighting setup including sounds and lighting. They

also affected the lightning inside the building that came through the windows which I

created by using a material instance constant that altered the emissive values on the

window and also hooked that up to a light. Again, I stopped the indoor lightning when the

arena started as the player rarely looked that direction and they were a large resource

dump.


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This picture illustrates how I created a looping sequence that would make the thunder and

lightning random, not only in occurrence but in the length and the sound of the thunder

itself. Included in the Gears of War packages were a series of different thunder sounds

ranging from high to low pitched. I created a sound cue which would pick a different

thunder sound by another random sequence. Initially I wanted to create a thunder system

that would change the pitch depending on how far you were through the level to give the

impression of the storm getting closer, however, after a few mock-ups, I preferred the

feeling of the storm cloud being huge, engulfing the entire metropolis which was the city of

Artus

2: HOW THE PRODUCT WORKS

Because I had decided to work with the Unreal engine, more specifically the Gears of War

version, I was limited to the games controls, assets and general game play type. I could write

in my document how I wanted it differently, but it wouldnt feel right when playing. Luckily,

the Gears of War play style was very similar to the play style I had envisioned for Artus, so

was the assets, albeit a little too gothic and not so much Steampunk.

At the core of the game, to make it Artus instead of Gears of War is Kismet. With this, I

could change different aspects of the game, even if just slightly or visually, to take the player

away from a Gears of War experience and into an Artus experience. Kismet is really

powerful, and allowed me to do such things like:

Include the Seed system: Unfortunately, the Gears of War version of the enginelacked the math operators in Kismet, I have no idea why and they are quintessential

for most aspects of Kismet, which hindered what I could make by a great deal. This

included the core mechanics behind the implementation of Seed; however, I could

include the visual aspects and give the player a rough feeling of what I wanted.

Modify the players appearance: Through a dirty hack, I could change the player ingame from Marcus to any other character, within reason, that came with Gears of


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War. In the end though, I decided to stick with Marcus as the look and feel related

the most to Alessandro, plus Epic put the most work into his model. I did, however,

add assets to him including the goggles and particle effects. I modified the goggles to

have a glow and I personally think they look Steampunk, so that worked out well.

The particle emitters at the players feet were to 1) Show where the player wasbetter 2) Show what faction the player was currently with.

3: TESTING AND FEEDBACK

I got sporadic testing throughout the entire development of Artus, from peers at university,

family members and also from forums such as the Gears of War forum. The feedback was

really useful in determining which direction and what actions the players would do at

certain points. When youre working on your project all the time, you take for granted

certain things.

The first time I showed off my game, I realised players couldnt find the right way. This was

because of a number of reasons:

The level was too dark: I wanted a dark level because the level was meant to bescary and make the player anxious, plus it was set at night time in a place without

many lights. I soon realised though that it was far too dark and any light on the

screen meant the player became lost very easily. After looking through other games

where lighting was supposed to be dark such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil, I

realised that the map itself didnt have to be so dark. Using the right techniques, themap can just be as scary and hold just as many surprises. I changed a few things in

my map to combat this problem including:

o Increased the brightness and size of the flashlighto Used Post Process effects to increase the brightnesso Added a dim skylight and lots more small dim lights.

The player couldnt find their way: Testers who had played first person shootersbefore had more luck finding their way then people who hadnt, but even they got

confused where to go. The two places which confuse people the most were the

stairs going into the government building and the doors inside the government

building. A couple of ways I fixed this:

o I added lights to the stairs outside which the player could easily see a longway away and follow. I also blocked everything else off so it was a linear path

from the railway to the stairs.

o I lit up the government building more using spotlights and also used a fogvolume to provide more ambient lighting, making it easier for the player to

find their way.

o Inside, for the doors, I used a method which I discovered on Mass Effect 2and really liked the way it worked. I made a small animated graphic and


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placed it on a plane static mesh which had no collision. I use this on all the

doors that are interactive, granted there isnt many in the demo, but its a

trend I would have continued with further. Once the player has opened the

door, I just hide the mesh via Toggle Hidden in kismet.

o One of my last sections, the morgue inside the hospital was very hard tonavigate after the lights had been turned off. What made it worse was that it

was a very small room, so when the player aimed they really couldnt see

much. In Resident Evil, they wanted to go for something like this, restricting

the players view to build anxiety and suspense, but it really didnt work for

my game. So after I got the feedback back, I changed the morgue to be

brighter.

Some of the best critical feedback came with regards to my church level. I pride

myself on my knowledge of lighting and colour theory and theres times when you

have to ignore what the feedback you get and go with your gut. People dont always

know what they want and I felt this was a perfect example of it.

The church level was meant to be a place of sanctuary, a place where the player

could go and they could feel relaxed. The church was meant as a hub for players and

NPCs, a place where they could buy weapons, acquire missions and tasks and get to

know other characters in the game. As it was a church and the game has religious

undertones, I wanted to portray the feeling that god was protecting this church, or

at least some divine force.

To get this feeling and look, I used a bright orange analogous colour theme, with

large sun rays shining through the windows and the use of emissive materials to fake

the glow on the window. I also used ambient sounds of birds and other wildlife as

well as the sound of water dripping as the storm in the first level has passed. I

personally thought they all worked well together, but I got a lot of crits from the

community around the forum. They instead wanted me to go for a complementary

colour theme, but I felt that adding dark shadows and blue tones to the church

would take away the feeling of security and that godly presence. I did take their

comments on board though and when I built my night version I did indeed go for a

complementary colour theme and I like to think I got something out of it because the

discussion certainly helped me see how colours work in games, how they set the

mood, the pacing the general feel for that section of a level.

4: EVALUATION AND SELF APPRAISEL

4.1: SELF APPRAISAL


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I found that my final major project went fairly well. I think in the year since I first started

thinking about ideas, Ive come on a long way as a games and especially as a level designer.

Ive learnt so much about the Unreal3 Engine and I think it shows in my work, especially

when you follow my blog and look at my latest work.

When I look back over my proposal document, Im surprised at how close it resembles what

I came up almost 8 months ago, not only in story, but style and mechanics. One of the areas

where it certainly doesnt match my initial proposal document is in the art style of the

game. The reason for this was primarily a lax in ability, unfortunately Im not a brilliant 3D

artist, and Im even worse when it comes down to drawing. I could see the Steampunk styles

I wanted in my head but I was unable to transfer them over to paper or over to 3D without

them looking cheesy. I also felt that I wouldnt be able to make all the assets I needed in the

allotted time without sacrificing more important, well important to me, duties such as the

general level design and ideas.

I wrote down so things that I would like achieve with the Unreal engine by the time I had

finished this project, Ill quickly go through them here:

BECOME AN EXPERT WITH KISMET

Kismet was something that I took an immediate liking to because of my fascination of

coding that I had. I worked with Actionscript 2 and 3 before I started this project and I found

that learning how to code, even with a language as different as Actionscript 2 really helped

me understand the mechanics behind Kismet.

I used kismet a lot in my game, perhaps not as much as I wanted but by the end I was

primarily concerned about general level design as the job I wanted to pursue after I left

university was a level designer, although granted, a lot of the level designers tasks would be

to use Kismet in scripting encounters for example, or quickly making scenarios to show to

the team before theyre properly coded in.

A few of the things I achieved with kismet include:

Level Streaming: The best way to have large levels or pseudo levels to house assetssuch as lighting.

UIScenes: UIScenes work with a modified version of kismet. By learning how theprimary Kismet worked I could then transfer what I knew into the UIScene to make

conversations with characters.

Triggered events: Triggered events are the basis for all encounters in the game aswell as any scripted events really.

Arena: I was able to make an arena style encounter which had the player fightingmultiple waves of enemies for 5 minutes.


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Light Saturation Material: Another material that came to me in an eureka moment.This material displays as colour if its in direct or strong light, but greyscale if its not.

Perfect for that film noir feel.

Water materials: Through deconstructing the materials that came with Epics GoW, Iwas able to work out how they made materials wet and look as if they had waterrunning down or splashing on them

LEARN THE BASICS OF CODING WITH UNREALSCRIPT

I was actually quite surprised I got round to doing this, especially due to the fact that GoW

doesnt allow the user to add their own UnrealScript. I eventually got round to it in UDK,

following a few tutorials and then making my own.

Just by doing these tutorials I discovered the sort of power that UnrealScript gave

developers, its something I plan on learning more of but only when I get in the industry so

that I have both more time to myself and I have professionals to help me.

BE ABLE TO MAKE INTERACTIVE SCENES WITH UISCENE

This is linked to my first milestone achievement of becoming an expert with Kismet. I wasnt

sure how UIScenes worked under the hood until I got the training books from 3DBuzz. By

reading these I found out that UIScenes have their own modified stripped down version of

kismet for making interactive UI scenes.

Originally I was only planning on using UIScenes to create simple conversations between the

player and NPCs. In the end however, I used it for a lot more, including interacting with

objects in the world and gathering research, making decisions with other characters with

real consequences and I even created a title scene using it.

UNDERSTAND HOW THE ANIMATION AND FACE S YSTEM WORKS

Because Ive never made a character in 3D, or tried to import them into Unreal, Ive neverworked with a few features like the AnimTree, PhAT, or the FaceFX, this applied to Artus

too. It was something I never got round to and something I dont think Ill need. I only had

interaction with a few characters in game and only for a short period of time, so I didnt

think it was necessary to spend all the time learning when there were other more important

features I wanted to learn.

WORK WITH THE SOUND SYSTEM

I set this goal for myself under the illusion I would never actually use the sound systemexcept for placing ambient sounds. However, once I got my Mastering Unreal Technology


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books, I soon learnt that the sound system embedded in Unreal is actually quite powerful

and fun to use.

I used the sound cues a number of times throughout Artus, with the most complex being

the ambient sound selection sequence in the persistent level. This would pick different

thunders, screams, explosions at random, and I even had it so that different pitch thunder

sounds would play depending on how far the player was through the level. I decided to

change this though because I liked the idea of the thunder storm been huge, and the sound

coming from all over.

HAVE A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF THE PARTICLE SYSTEM CASCADE

I didnt use Cascade much throughout Artus, but I used it enough to complete my personal

goal. It wasnt until recently that I realised what was possible with it when I watched a

technical artists show reel of effects made in Cascade. Included in them was a phosphorus

smoke grenade which looked amazing. After that, I had a further look but I still made semi-

basic assets. A few of them you can see are smoke and fires, the particle effects around the

players and NPCs feet, and the effects when the player changes faction.

There is a large section in the Mastering Unreal Technology books about cascade and its

something I plan on learning more about. I want to understand how to use trail, ribbon and

beam particles, especially now that Im using UDK and a lot of work will be my own.

BECOME CONFIDENT WITH THE MATINEE SYSTEM

I had a real, not fear but anxiety about using the Matinee system. When I made my first UT3

map the year before, I remember Matinee being a complete pain, the slightest change you

made would cause the camera to have a stroke and fly to the other end of the map. Luckily,

in Artus I really didnt have any problems except when I tried to make a fly through of my

map.

I added a lot of Matinee sequences in Artus and I now fully understand the power behind it,

its not just for making cinematic sequences, but it can affect everything in the game. I used

it to control all of my particle effects, I used it when interacting with characters and objects

and I used it for material changes. As my level was very interactive, relying on the player to

look around and use objects and talk with people, I had to become confident with Matinee.

One use of Matinee I was extremely pleased about was the Bullet time effect I created

when the player killed an enemy. I had no idea this was possible when I first started using it,

but after playing around for a few days I came across it by accident, and since then it had

opened my mind to a lot of other possibilities. I also control the dissolve material which is

applied to dead enemies by using matinee, which in turn talks to a Material Instance

Constant.


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So I feel I achieved all my goals regarding the Unreal 3 engine, except of course the FaceFX

one, but that can be expected.

The story was one aspect of the game which I kept almost identical through my game, with

a few minor alterations here and there to fit in with the general game play. It was a story I

spent a long time on and it had already gone through a lot of iterations and major changes

before I even wrote it down in my proposal document.

4.2 IMPROVEMENTS

If I had the time and manpower, the main thing I would have changed would have been the

engine. Gears of War was just far too unstable and UDK provided so many more useful

assets. The only problem is that there isnt many resources in UDK, so I would have had to of

made all the assets myself. Im not that bad at 3D, but Im not brilliant at Unwrapping. Also,

I would have been stuck with the Unreal Tournament style game play and only a single

character. Working in a team though, I think it would have worked out really well.

Other things I would have changed would have been the general layout of the levels. Im a

lot more confident now and Ive changed the way I think from what can I do that is possible

in the engine to What can I push the engine to do. I would push the levels more to be a

really cinematic experience, especially after playing Uncharted 2 and seeing what is

possible. Now that I know the engine inside out now, I also would have changed the level

layout. As it stands, its a very linear level, which is fine, but its a straight linear level. This

makes occlusion a nightmare, as well as spawning enemies, level streaming and it makes the

level feel smaller. Also, the government building layout is really bad, far too open, not

enough cover; it just doesnt fit in with the Gears of War type of game play, although it

would be fine in Artus. Instead, I would have made it more corridor and room based rather

than a massive open room with a really high ceiling.

I made an addition to the design document at the end which was the implementation ofabilities that the player would research. The abilities would come in trees or tiers that were

split into three different paths. Armour, Weapons and the Player would have three of these

tiers that were different for different players play styles. I really enjoyed making these

abilities up and if I had more time I would have designed all the abilities plus the tiers and I

would have liked to have implemented them, even if it was just the UIScenes.

4.3 FUTURE SCOPE

I, personally, think that Artus could well be a real game in the future. I think it has the right

ideas and mechanics, similar to proven ones that are already out there. I think the art style


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and story would fit in perfectly for a game and its a style which hasnt been done much, but

so many people like Steampunk out there. When I was writing my design document, there

was so much I wanted to do but I its just not possible for one person, especially not in the

time allotted.

My year two project was a farm based flash game for Facebook, a few months later

Farmville was released making millions. If, in a few months time, theres a game based on

the same story and mechanics I have in this game, Ill scream and check my phone for bugs.

I would love to pursue this game further, and maybe in the future, if I ever go indie and

make a small team, I might relight Artus and finish it.

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