Upheaval - University Game Project

Alirean

Hi there,

Currently residing in New Zealand we are a small team of talented third year university students that have collaborated together over a six week pre-production cycle to create a game.

We have learnt UE4 from scratch and completely by ourselves have managed to create the game Upheaval.Upheaval is an upcoming action brawler by Beast Mode Studios in association with Media Design School where you can’t even trust the ground you stand on.

Fast-paced, free-for-all ranged combat and a wide variety of defensive and offensive abilities, the stakes have never been higher. The first game mode available is a competition of deadly skill: first to ten kills wins the title of champion while their opponents can cry in the knowledge that they got their ass beat.

Over 20 characters are planned alongside 7 different battle arenas and 5 different game modes. Upheaval is sure to make even the most cautious competitor come out of their shell fighting for their place as champion.

Over the next sixteen weeks, our second and last semester at University, we are moving forward into the production cycle of our game development. We are hoping that the polycount community could critique and evaluate our work in terms of the 3D artstyle we have chosen so that we can continue to grow in hopes of progressing into the game industry when we graduate at the end of the year.

You can view our current Pre-pre-pre Alpha footage here:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLzuVBCA7H8[/ame]

We do know we have a ton of work to do as this is just a vertical slice to show off where we want to take the game further in production. (And yes we have no sound designer as we are all artists and coders) - therefore the music and sound fx will change and it wont hurt our feelings if you mute the video.

If you would like to follow our work throughout the duration you are most welcome as this will be updated throughout the year bi-weekly. You can also follow our progress on our facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/nzbeastmode

As always the polycount community is always inspirational and motivating to achieving the highest potential possible artwork and look forward to getting lost in the wonderous artwork that the worlds artists have to offer.

Ged

good start! quite fun and pretty graphics. So whats in your vertical slice? are you going to make sure 2 characters and 1 environment work really really well before you move on to all the rest? Personally I would be very impressed if any university level team can create 1 working environment and 3 working characters to choose from that are all well balanced in combat and expertly animated.

Its hard to tell what the player is doing at the moment, need more animations and the animations need to match the movement of the character better. The combat is confusing as well, cant see what the player is aiming at and the vfx dont really help convey whether the player has hit or missed or whats going on.

Alirean

@Ged So basically the vertical slice project was to come up with a game idea and build as much as you can to show the feel of where you next sixteen weeks is going. Yes the animations are an issue as some of the effects don't correctly match up and need a heck load of work, but we wanted to get some basic ones in that we can start from and progress from there. The lighting especially the emissive on the lava is overiding quite alot of our inbuilt postprocessing toon shader and materials and therefore quite a few things have been lost which will be re-found over the next week or two when we get some time.

In terms of onhit effects and combat it was thrown together in the past two weeks alongside our other papers that we have on top of this project and we have not balanced it at all. We have a ton of work to do to get the combat down and over the past two days more VFX has been added to compensate for players to get feedback on if their spells have hit or not. What you are viewing is a small video for our tutors to view and critique us as well as posting it up to communities such as polycount so we can make it better and better.

Our aim is to yes have one really great working environment with a decaying level with the players objective to knock the opposing players off the edge into the lava. We plan to have a similar functioning map with a different theme and objective such as Capture the Flag. This is very early days and hopefully by the end of the year we will have made something truly special.

Thanks for the Feedback!

Alirean

Didn't see there was a quick reply button, so have posted my reply.