A Rat Within
FMP
Nathaniel Dovey
Level design
To start off my level design and what i want to do with it I will start to work out the base shape of the level or room is, this will be heavily modelled of the old factory workhouses that were supplied to the workers so they could work more hours and the criminal having to live away from there family might induce jealousy of the rich and then give them the incentive to do the crime.
To make my initial level as an example for the block out modelling I will use dungeon scrawl.
This is only the base stage of the level design, to make this I used the website dungeon scrawl to make the outline top down view of the room where the game is going to be set, the way I imagined this in my head is that the long part at the bottom is the walkway and the door leading to the room, this is where the employees would put their shoes, the next part would be the desk in front of the walk way. This is where the criminal would of planned the crime that he committed I also plan to make this desk in the level after i get the mechanics down because I will just use a block to as a place holder the next part of this level is the bathroom, the bathroom is the room in the top right of the room, I wanted to put it in the room not as a luxury but to show that the employees are more like prisoners that are forced to work the factory's rather than free men by having the toilet in the room it shows that even when they need to relieve themselves they are still not allowed to leave. this could also reinforce the feeling jealousy and the need to escape which could be a motive the room might have more storage than shown in the dungeon scrawl i also plan to add a bed in the space below the bathroom
Making the base house in Maya
After giving myself the room dungeon scrawl picture as a sort of guide I started to make it in Maya, when I started making it I wanted it to be made out of one block so it was easier to move around and export so to start off I made my camera look down from a birds eye view and spawned in a cube, with the cube I then use the scale tool to stretch it to the correct shape. i also tried to make the little walkway this way too but it was much simpler if i used the multi cut tool to make an edge the right size and then extruded it to the length i wanted. After finishing the floor i started on the walls, I did this by going on face mode and clicking sides of the floor and then extruding it with the thickness setting. this then made a separate line around the entire floor i could then use to pull up walls.
Making the bedroom
To make the bedroom of this room I used the insert edge loop to make a rectangle in the top right corner to make a separate face, after doing this I then extruded the new face and made it smaller but in doing so it made the lines where I can pull up the walls, after making the bedroom walls I made a rectangle in the right shape of the door and put it in one of the bedroom walls and the long bit at the beginning then used a Boolean to make a hole in the wall, and because the front door will be closed throughout game I just pulled the two sides together to make it closed.
After finishing the models for the house ui then imported it into unreal to see how big it would be and if it look alright, when i first spawned it i had trouble figuring out how to go into it as it was being made as one solid object so i had to look up a tutorial on how to do it and i just needed to change a simple setting in the view chart
Making the Inventory System
When i first came up with the idea of making an inventory system i had no clue on what i was doing so i had to look up some help and i found this really easy to follow and simple tutorial by Ryan Lanley on YouTube, it was included in an 11 video playlist on how to completely set up the inventory system.
In this video all the guy does is set up the main components to the inventory to work like the code for the items and how to make a new interact key. but also how to set up a pin structure for the code to work, a pin structure is just different pins coded to work with different variables in the same block to make it more compact and clean, in the picture on side you can see at the bottom where you would customise each items name description and thumbnail when you out it in the inventory
The other parts to the video is just setting up the item code so it actually responds to the letter e being pressed but because the inventory isn't set up yet he just uses the event interact to destroy the item in game to give it the illusion of being picked up but to also see if it responds to the button
Making the inventory HUD
using widgets
This video in the playlist consists of using widgets to make the HUD of the inventory including all code from the induvial slots where the items will go to and setting up a different game mode setting so the mouse appears on screen
to start the making of the HUD i had to create 4 different widgets one for the actual HUD, one for the slots where the items go, one for the background and what the slots will be attached and lined up on and finally one for the description and items name that appears when you hover over it
The next thing shown in the video was making the individual slots in the inventory, these had to specially coded so thing would actually go into it and show up with the correct image
After making the slots design and code the next thing was the window that shows the slots and that as a exit button, to create the new button i had to make a new component so i could connect it to the original code using a custom event graph
After doing the complicated stuff on the widgets all that was left to do on this video was make sure that everything links up and appears and disappears when the right button is pressed but i also had a lot of problem with the grey background for the inventory window, the problem i had made it so when i opened the inventory the grey background wasn't big enough and only covered a little rectangle in the top left so. to fix this it took a little while because i could delete the box entirely as it had important code on it and it was still connected to the border and the text so whatever happened to it that happened to the other stuff, so to fix it i had to move the grey box out of sight from the player then manually move everything back in place and hoped it all lined up and around 10 minuets later i got it working fine, i wish i could of fixed it properly and had the grey background but i could find any fix in the video or in the comments so it was probably something due to changes in unreal engine or me not following it properly
the last part of the tutorial I used went through the process of adding interactable items and putting them in the inventory.
this tutorial was the least complicated to follow as everything was already set up in the other tutorials but I did run into the problem of the rows not going in the right place, this was made by the code being different from the tutorial, i don't know why this happened as I did the exact same thing but to fix it i just needed to change a simple value from 1 to 2
Making the models for the items
To make this simple box I all I did was make a cube enlarge it, put an edge loop down the middle, extracted the faces, moved the pivot point to the edge and rotated it up. but after i did this the inside of the box and the underneath of the open lids where black, this is a bad thing as it meant that from a certain angle the walls would be invisible so to fix this all i did was make the walls thicker using the extract tool, this then fixed it
to make this desk was much harder, to start it all I did was create a box and stretch it out to make the legs but i also wanted to give it a bit of character by making the legs thin out at the bottom, after this i used the bridge tool to make the big base of the desk then used the extract and pull up method i used on the house to make the place where you could store stuff. after doing that i realised that it looked weird as just a box so i grabbed both the vertices on the front and pulled them down to make a slant of sorts and as i was looking around it i realised that a lot of the walls where black and invisible so i spent around 10 minutes with the teachers help to make them not invisible, this included deleting random faces and edges to see what worked. After that was done I then started on the top of the desk that could swing open like a door, to do this i just copy and pasted the bottom of the desk and then pulled the front vertices down to get the same shape
to make the bullets was quite simple and as i cant see it much from the size in the game i didn't need to put a lot of detail into them so all i did was make a cylinder put a dent into it at the bottom using extrude and then rounded it off at the top using a bevel and then just copy and pasted it a few times to make the rows.
Next i made the picture frame that will play a big part in the narrative for my game as it will reveal information about the criminal and the head of police. To make the picture frame i made the just got a square, flattened it out and extruded the face to make areas that i can pull up. I then pulled up the sides to make the frame. After doing the sides i then spawned a new square and made a rectangle then combined it with the picture and its frame to make the complete
getting references for the gun was quite simple, all i had to do was look up a quick YouTube video of a low poly tommy gun models and i basically remade it from eye. I made the main body and stock from one square and and then i used a flattened and stretched cylinder for the magazine and then a long cylinder for the barrel
This cupboard was quite easy to make, all i did was spawn in a rectangle, then do the same tactic on the that i did on the box to create the open look and then i extruded the top side to widened and thickened it out to make the to where you can put stuff in top of it
Next I waned to make the bed that will have gun hidden underneath it, to start it I wanted to make the metal header and base so to do this I first spawned a cylinder and made it thin and tall, after it was the right size I then went to the deform tab, then to non linear then to bend and then I bent the top of the pillar to make a 90 degree turn. after that I copy and pasted the original and rotated and lined it up so it made a full frame I then combined and copy and pasted again and shrunk it to make the end post, after the frame was complete I just got a new cube and stretched it then bevelled it for the mattress and the pillow
In the 3rd video for the inventory tutorial the maker went through some very important code that the items in my game need, this is the code that make me able to pick them up, before the item would just be destroyed when i pressed E but now he changed it on the master item, i call it the master item as it is where all the others come from as all i do to create a new item is duplicate the master and change the name, description, thumbnail, model and texture it might sound complex but it is quite simple.
This is the master code that will be continuously copied and pasted to make new items that can be picked up and looked at.
Using the copied code to make items
This model is a mixture of the desk model and the photo frame model, this is because in my game the player will be able to open and close certain things to see more hidden stuff towards the narrative.
this is an image o the desk from above but it still has the lid unopened and the light on it is kind of like a marker to show where interactable things are. like the items or a moving thing
This is an image of the bed with the gun model hidden underneath it, i have done this like the desk to add a bit more depth to the narrative unlike just putting something in the middle of the room, this model group also has the light to show that its interactable
because I wanted have things get moved out of the way and things open I copied my door opening and sliding code from another project to use in the scene, i used the sliding version to make it look like i pushed the bed across to reveal the gun and i used the opening one to make the desk top swing open and reveal the picture frame.
Making the camera system
to make the camera and taking photo system in my game i once again followed a tutorial by Ryan Laley, I have found him to be a very big help in my scene and i would not have done it without his tutorials so i will keep using them. the camera system i followed was again in a playlist so this helped me find the other parts easier
In the first video in the tutorial it goes over the individual movement of the camera from the character and how to switch between the 2 different game modes. at first when i created the code i couldn't look up or down i could only move along the horizontal axis and as i watched later on in the video it turns out i had missed the part where he fixed that problem because he had it happen too
the second part of the video consists of taking a picture using widgets
This tutorial is where i started to encounter lots of problems, like the inventory system i had to use widgets to make the photos respond in real time and appear in the screen but i as i was new to using widgets i was nervous about doing it, so i had to turn the video down to 0.5 speed to make sure i didn't miss any details but somehow i still managed to do that it could of been that or it could of been because of my preference settings or the fact i had an updated unreal 4. either way i still fixed the issue of the picture not being centred. the code for this part was quite simple as all had to do was remap the take picture button to the left click. after it all worked properly the tutorial also showed me how to make an animation for the camera using opacity and key frames.
The last part of this tutorial was all about making the code and the widget to make the camera roll
this videos code was easy to follow like normal but once again I struggled on the widget, for some still unknown reason when I make the camera roll and open it I cant make the pictures saved on it any bigger, even by 1 unit on one of the axis' I found this to be a real problem as in the video I wanted to record it is very hard to make out what is on the camera roll, when I do increase or decrease the unit sometimes it will either make every image on the camera roll the latest picture it took or it will crash. sometimes it will even look like it will work then when I end the play session and try to reload it it will crash, I spent a good 30 minuets with my teacher trying to fix this issue with no results, the only way to fix cold of been to restart the entire code but i did not want to do this, luckily it all worked out in the end because when i went to full screen to record the final playthrough it was a good size
Adding crouching
in my game i wanted to have a cupboard that i could crouch down to look at or to collect an item from this crouching code was really easy to follow as it didn't include making any new variables or using widgets all it had to do was when the game registered me pressing shift the camera moved down a bit to give the look of crouching