Codename: Courage (UE4)
Hello!
I'm in my final year at University of Derby and we are creating a game as a team project for the next 12 weeks for one of our modules. The assignment is to create a 2-player co-operative game (at least a polished portion of it) based on the topic that has been set, which is "Escape".
We are hoping to use this as a place to share progress of the game, and hopefully get some feedback/ crits as well.
THE GAME
The project is finished!
Final trailer:
https://vimeo.com/127375575
Final screenshots can be found here:
http://www.cgstudentawards.com/game-of-the-year/courage
"A child (Alex) is accompanied into a dream state by a spirit wolf named Courage, a manifestation of her own inner courage. As she explores, the pair tackle the child's fears one by one, in a tale of friendship, fears and bravery. Each chapter is a new fear, with the environment and mechanics revealing which fear the child will be batling."
We are using Unreal Engine 4 and the game is a 2-player co-operative game for the Oculus Rift (Main player is 1st person and wears the rift, the 2nd player is 3rd person without a rift).
List of features:
THE TEAM
Art:
Josh Williams (disownedbeef) - Lead Character artist
Nikolay Kolev (NIcksun93) - Character artist
Edvinas Petrauskas (ed_3d) - Lead & Environment artist
Krzysztof Chrostowski (Krizzy) - Environment artist and Puzzle designer
Alfred Golovanov (Alfred1992) - Vegetation and asset artist
Joe Cooper (JAC) - Prop artist
Programming:
James Tatum (Splosion900) - Project Management, general programming
Bradley Stone - Lead programmer - Gameplay, UI
Rob Watling (TheWobling) - AI and general programming
Tomas Volkovickas - Puzzles/Events, AI
Aleksandra Wojtyla - Puzzles/Events, AI
THE DEADLINE
24/04/2015
-
Thanks
I'm in my final year at University of Derby and we are creating a game as a team project for the next 12 weeks for one of our modules. The assignment is to create a 2-player co-operative game (at least a polished portion of it) based on the topic that has been set, which is "Escape".
We are hoping to use this as a place to share progress of the game, and hopefully get some feedback/ crits as well.
THE GAME
The project is finished!
Final trailer:
https://vimeo.com/127375575
Final screenshots can be found here:
http://www.cgstudentawards.com/game-of-the-year/courage
"A child (Alex) is accompanied into a dream state by a spirit wolf named Courage, a manifestation of her own inner courage. As she explores, the pair tackle the child's fears one by one, in a tale of friendship, fears and bravery. Each chapter is a new fear, with the environment and mechanics revealing which fear the child will be batling."
We are using Unreal Engine 4 and the game is a 2-player co-operative game for the Oculus Rift (Main player is 1st person and wears the rift, the 2nd player is 3rd person without a rift).
List of features:
General:Child:
- Full co-operative gameplay
- Full Oculus Rift support
- Checkpoint loading/saving
Wolf:
- Slingshot weapon to attack enemies and use in puzzles
- Can pick up and carry puzzle items
- Sanity (health) decreases when overwhelmed by spiders or when separated from the wolf. Regenerates when close to the wolf
- Faints (dies) when the sanity runs out
- Shouts for help when losing sanity
- Head rotates with the camera
Enemies:
- Can see spirit objects that are invisible to the child
- Howl ability to reveal spirit objects to the child
- Growl ability to scare/stun enemies
- Is a secondary source of light
- Can jump
- Changes color when child is losing sanity
- Head rotates with the camera
- Looks at the child while idling
World:
- Spider Queen boss
- 3 types of normal spiders (ranged, melee, and squad spiders)
User Interface:
- 6 key locations
- 5 puzzles
- Wildlife (small spiders, bats), flee when approached
- Interactive world objects (hanging lantern, football, swings)
- Falling tree event
- Ghost train approaching event
Game Modes:
- Full main menu
- Full graphical options
- In-game pause menu
- Network Lobbying
- Credits
Audio:
- Network Lan Play
- Split Screen Play
- Original soundtrack
- Voice acting for the child
- Forest ambience
- Wolf growl/howl
- NPC sounds
THE TEAM
Art:
Josh Williams (disownedbeef) - Lead Character artist
Nikolay Kolev (NIcksun93) - Character artist
Edvinas Petrauskas (ed_3d) - Lead & Environment artist
Krzysztof Chrostowski (Krizzy) - Environment artist and Puzzle designer
Alfred Golovanov (Alfred1992) - Vegetation and asset artist
Joe Cooper (JAC) - Prop artist
Programming:
James Tatum (Splosion900) - Project Management, general programming
Bradley Stone - Lead programmer - Gameplay, UI
Rob Watling (TheWobling) - AI and general programming
Tomas Volkovickas - Puzzles/Events, AI
Aleksandra Wojtyla - Puzzles/Events, AI
THE DEADLINE
24/04/2015
-
Thanks
Replies
By Krizzy:
By me:
By NIcksun93:
Anyhow, we have now started diving into 3D, so we'll be able to start posting. We're at the blocking out phase at the moment.
The past few weeks I have mostly spent finalizing the level layout and the landscape more, so we could start blocking out the locations and bringing them into the engine. Also tried to establish some base mood/ lighting.
The main locations we'll be doing are: playground, shack/old house, train station, tunnel, bridge, as well as some other smaller areas of interest. The level itself is a pine forest, and the areas of interest I have mentioned above are all located within it. They all have been intentionally chosen to (and will be made to) seem a little random and out of place (ties to the backstory), while also being abandoned/creepy and lightly overgrown (also ties to the story).
The whole level will be pretty much wide linear. I don't want to have a boring narrow path connecting everything, and making the player feel constrained like they're being forced to follow it, and open world type of environment is also out of the question as it probably wouldn't work. So the best option was to try and have a bit of both, having a pre-determined path which leads/guides the player to the points of interest, but at the same time gives them some space and encourages to explore parts of the environment along the way (and rewards them for doing so).
Here's a quick top-down, showing where the layout and the main path currently stand. The idea I had was that it would spiral back to the starting area (technically below it) and lead you through a train tunnel out onto the bridge (final location), which you briefly see from distance at the beginning of the level.
More wip to come soon from myself and from the rest of the team
So here are some WIP screenies of the bridge:
I used the idea from Vanishing of Ethan Carter for the planks of wood and being able to look below the bridge - just to give the on the edge feel to the player.
Here is a variation of a pine tree:
Everything is still a work in progress - I have lots more to show but thats for next time
I'm one of the character artists on this project. I'm working on making the wolf look ethereal and magical, and a big spider queen, I'd love to have some help in making some ghostly particles and shaders. I have a fresnel effect for now, i'd love to hear what you think!
Here are some of the things I've been up to lately.
Fiddling with the lighting/ mood a bit. It's giving me a bit of a headache, not a big fan of night time lighting hehe. Have also been reworking and tweaking the landscape, forest paths/ general layout, vegetation placement etc.
Have been looking into LOD's, specifically billboard lod's for the foliage. As we are aiming for around 75 fps, it hasn't been working out very well with the foliage not having any billboards. Therefore after some testing I have decided on the following level of detail setup for the foliage: LOD0 - original mesh, LOD1 - stripped down version of lod0, LOD2 - billboard.
Originally wanted to use camera facing 1 plane billboards, but decided to keep them only for distant vista foliage, and instead use criss-cross planes for the LOD2, as that way we can capture the trees from more than 1 side which results in better representation of the tree from most angles and therefore nicer transition between LOD2 and LOD1 in-game. Could have potentially squeezed in another level of detail, but it wasn't needed since the level is quite foggy with fairly low draw distance.
(just a quick test, ignore the glitchy-ness!)
Working on one of my locations. I'm trying to go for a farmhouse family home type of thing. Still WIP so any crits are welcome. Currently switched to figuring out the layout of the interior and filling it in with props, will go over the whole thing afterwards to polish the meshes and materials.
Here is the layout I have going on for the ground floor interior:
The upstairs layout is being worked on right now, but it will feature one open room, while the rest of the rooms will not be accessible.
Some extra ideas I want to implement within this location:
-Glow in the dark stars on the ceiling of the upstairs room.
-Open window and APEX curtain blowing out it in the wind.
-Some of the window shutters being dynamic, hitting the house due to "wind" and creating impact sound fx.
-Another pass on the house to make it feel creepy/ abandoned, lightly taken back by the nature, but due to it being lifeless and empty for a very long time, so no random man-caused destruction. Was also considering leaving the upstairs room more normal / not abandoned, but still thinking about it.
More updates soon
I made some high poly grass.
I then baked it onto a plane, and then cut those planes up to start arranging them to make more variations of clumps.
Here are the maps.
Here it is ingame
On the topic of flowers here I wanted to make some white flowers. Went and researched some white flowers that grow in forests and came across Ornithogalum umbellatum.
Here is the high poly textured
Here are the texture maps.
Here it is ingame (sorry for darkness)
Here is the high poly.
Here it is ingame.
Here is the high poly
Here are the maps
Here is the low poly
Foliage is looking sweet and the wolf. Can't wait to see more
No trickery as far as I know :P. Just subtle blue tints in the Post Process and a Night Time color LUT, Directional and Skylight have the color set to roughly #265181FF, tweaked Sky Sphere colors and an ExponentialHeightfog is set to a very dark blue. Let me know if you want more info!
I think that about covers it. Thanks for the info! Really stoked to see how this turns out for your team. Best of luck.
[IMG][/img]
High Poly to bake onto plane
Low Poly
My major tasks this week were to get the layout of the interior of the house done and start filling it with assets, and also look into Substance tools and how we could use them, write up a guideline doc for the team and start creating some of the tiling materials that we planned out we will need.
House interior, I found it a bit tricky to figure out a layout that was close to something I had in my head and also functioned well. I wanted the interior to feel familiar to the player, like a common family house, with a layout that makes sense. Since I am not an interior designer, I had to dig into Google to research different designs/ floor plans etc. One problem was that most of what I could find in the style of the house that I wanted, was way bigger than the size of our house, so I had to mash different ideas together and try to get something that fits our house.
Here is what I ended up with for the ground floor:
And the upstairs:
Some reasons behind my design choices if anyone wants to read a wall of text
I wanted the player to walk through a tight corridor upon entering the house, to contrast with the large exterior they just walked out of, which would then lead to a larger open area again such as a dining room that has a bit more breathing space and maybe a puzzle, while the rest of the ground floor would be closed off. I would have loved to have more rooms accessible for exploration, however with the deadlines that we have, there is no way it could get done
Initially I thought the upstairs room would not have any puzzles, but just mainly be for exploration, so I didn't want to put the staircase at the start of the dining room, as then players might think that the dining room is not important and run up the stairs right away, so I've decided to have the staircase at the back forcing you to walk through the house.
As for the upstairs, I was planning to have an L shape staircase, but it ended up leading you pretty much into a wall and I couldn't change the wall because it would mess up the main room, so I decided to change the stairs to a U shape instead, to give player more breathing space after they exit the staircase. One other reason for the U staircase was so it wouldn't reveal the main room right away as well. I didn't want the room to be at your face as soon as you walk up the stairs, but instead have the player search for it a little. They've seen a glimpse of it from the outside as they approached the house, so they know it's there somewhere and they will search for it.
So I've started filling the interior with some assets, although not much to show yet
(Sorry if the screenshot is too dark)
Started diving into Substance designer to create some materials, still figuring it out but I'm loving it so far!
We have been super busy the past week, so haven't had a chance to update this. Some updates will be coming in soon though!
In the meantime, here's an Alpha trailer I just finished:
[ame]
Hope you like it! And as always any feedback is welcome
As the school module is now over, we won't be continuing the development of this. We are now working on the final trailer, which will be released around the end of this week along with the actual chapter of the game to download and play for free. You can play it with or without the Rift, and the game is fully networked, so both players can play from different computers.
Here are some in-game screenshots for now, and there will be more info, news on the trailer and the download of the game later this week!
Thanks man!
Some box/disc/promo art as well:
If you like it, a vote would be much appreciated too!
We are still planning to release the demo of the game for free, most likely in the next coming weeks.
Thanks for looking!
"A child (Alex) is accompanied into a dream state by a spirit wolf named Courage, a manifestation of her own inner courage. As she explores, the pair tackle the child's fears one by one, in a tale of friendship, fears and bravery. Each chapter is a new fear, with the environment and mechanics revealing which fear the child will be batling."
List of features: