This is a video of a showcase of our final result.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of our project was to make a problem-solving game in a dystopian space station, with puzzles and secrets to discover around the space station. The player was supposed to find a way to reach the control room the hearth of the station and again back control of it, we planned to have some area blocked at the beginning of the game as said before but to unlock them while the game was moving forward:

“The player will wake up from his cryo pod at the beginning of the game. After that, he will discover that the space station has been hacked and some parts of the station are inaccessible. After that, the player will need to solve some problem to get access to a certain area.”

In our original idea, there was also a part in the game where the player would have to float in space for a small segment to reach the power generator.

During this project, my main roles were of level designer, concept artist and texturing. In the beginning I was mainly concept artist and level designer because all the models weren’t already made therefore it was impossible to make the texture for them, as level designer I thought of most of the design of the game most of the room shape or looks was my idea but also my teammates helped me with the making of some levels or details and as concept artist I gave suggestion to Aaron and Jaz on how the models can look like to fit better in the game.

I also textured the game and I tried to keep a similar style to make the game looks more fluid we decided to give smaller object more details than the bigger one, also because most of the details the bigger object got were from the light that Alvis made I also did a bit of modelling that can be found outside one of the windows as “space junk” and as the satellite passing by during the final cut-scene of the game.

I also textured the game and I tried to keep a similar style to make the game looks more fluid we decided to give smaller object more details than the bigger one, also because most of the details the bigger object got were from the light that Alvis made I also did a bit of modelling that can be found outside one of the windows as “space junk” and as the satellite passing by during the final cut-scene of the game.

I also textured the game and I tried to keep a similar style to make the game looks more fluid we decided to give smaller object more details than the bigger one, also because most of the details the bigger object got were from the light that Alvis made I also did a bit of modelling that can be found outside one of the windows as “space junk” and as the satellite passing by during the final cut-scene of the game.

I also textured the game and I tried to keep a similar style to make the game looks more fluid we decided to give smaller object more details than the bigger one, also because most of the details the bigger object got were from the light that Alvis made I also did a bit of modelling that can be found outside one of the windows as “space junk” and as the satellite passing by during the final cut-scene of the game.

Picture of the first of debris in unreal after being modelled in 3DS MAX.  Picture of second debris in unreal after being modelled in 3DS MAX.Picture of the key card and keys with the texture in 3DS MAX.

With this project I learned a lot about Photoshop, before this course I knew nothing about it an I never used it, but now I know more about the program and how to use it and that’s good, I also enjoyed to think about the map and looks of the game, I think we managed to do a good job because all the models fit well together.

During the alpha and beta period of testing, we checked and decided what features we wanted to keep and which to take out. The 2 biggest things that we took out was the HUB room and the space segment and the turret feature we took away the spacewalk because it would have taken to long to make the skybox, and all the models then we had to take out the hub room because it wasn’t really necessary and the turret we weren’t able to finish them because we had to focus on the gravity part of the gameplay and finalize the rest of the game.

Not a lot of things went wrong during the development of our game, we had some little bug with unreal but that’s normal you can’ always have a perfect code there will always be some little code error in it, the only thing it went bad for me was that I made a texture and I didn’t use the correct resolution and I wasn’t happy with the final result so I wanted to remake it.

For keep track of our project we made use of a schedule it was pretty detailed and I helped us keep track on what it needed to be done and what we had left to finish what we were doing, during all the project we keep an eye on the schedule to see how we were doing in our development.

I feel like I manage pretty nicely to keep on track on the schedule, not all the task were perfectly timed but I can safely say I managed to keep track because I planned mine knowing my capabilities and leaving a bit of time for me to learn Photoshop at home, I also understood that keeping a schedule was important to make sure to do everything planned in the project.

The main influence for our game was mainly from tv and movie all focus on space and space exploration, the movie where we took inspiration is 2001 Space Odyssey for the evil AI, and other movie such as Gravity for the lack of oxygen and hope in  the possibility of coming back and other movie like aliens for small and cramped spaces.

I worked in  a team with Aaron, Alvis and Jaz and we made the game together our main way of communication was by voice while we were at college  and while we were doing some work from home we used other application such as Discord and Snapchat to communicate, while to communicate with the tutors I used WordPress to update them on the progress of the day.

I learned quite a bit from doing surveys and presentations that helped me to understand how to create a better presentation and survey, it’s also good to help improve your communication skill and how to talk with an audience to showcase and explain your game to someone that doesn’t play video games a lot, and with the help of the latest survey we did some little changes to make the player experience a bit better and fluid. For a detailed analysis of our final survey read this blog post.

CONCLUSION 

The final project wasn’t that far from our plans, the skills I improved the most are in greyboxing and in texturing but I want to improve my skill in 3d modelling and coding because I want to have a more varied set of skill to use in a future project and for some private projects.

This is the cut scene at the end of our game.