Donny Evason

Been a short while since I posted about my dungeon crawler: Project Tundra (Mainly due to new PC and refactoring some code base which wasn't too exciting tbh) I've changed the original character to a female hunter for now, the animations are in a pseudo state of setup, but the code base for her movement has changed and now it plays a lot smoother - Committing to the point and click to move, the character follows the direction of the mouse if held down too. I'm attempting to showcase are more pleasing aesthetic on the level design, adding a depth to the levels to make them more interesting when passing through. Simple enough to do in theory, but getting the right feel will take quite a few iterations. A few screenshots below showing a few added "levels" utilizing the XYZ axis a little more when creating the initial layout of the levels. In addition, I decided to tinker with the unity particle effects to create a portal VFX (In conjunction with ...

I say 101 but it's pretty basic and not ironclad by any stretch of the imagination - For all intents and purposes this is the most primitive design ideology/common sense that should be utilized when making levels - I'll stress the point here this is why we do a quick mock up level! when I started my original block out of what I wanted the level to look and feel like I started running into the basic issues that always arise; a few of these are generally aesthetic but a select few are general design principles - Let's examine: This was the first pass of an elevated stairway - the main issue is apart, think of this as a third person or even isometric game, what would the first thought be around the circled areas??? Space!? There's a lack of it for sure. Given the size of the room, the character, the enemies, puzzles and environments etc etc etc, there will be little space to move around/up the stairs without causing some obvious issues. Now this is of course dep...

Found some simple fire I wanted to try some speed lighting. I also hooked up a few of the animations for attacking/spin attack - At this point I also made the enemies/player do damage but It keeps bugging out...I need to fix this a.s.ap!

... and evidently when it's made of stone... So, hooking up the player character animations and movement controls was a time consuming process. And it works...for the most part. This was my first pass at implementing movement/playable character into unity - granted having a fully animated player character to import helps a tonne, but splitting out the animations and linking them up when the character runs/walks was a new experience for me. I create a small dummy hallway of sorts to get a sense of scale, movement, enemies and all that jazz. Here's a gif to show it semi working: Now, the thing to take from this is, my initial pass I was still unsure of what kind of camera/control scheme I was going to utilize in this level/game/prototype/vertical slice/buzzword 5/thing. The method above shows the characters direction being oriented around the mouse location, the beginnings of a point and click...sort of..or more accurately, WASD and the mouse will aim the character - ...

A small update considering the state of things, rudimentary AI has been implemented, simple debug spawn and they will run to location of newly placed building and perform the "build" task. I'm still deciding on the initial ideal of the game, Main premises are: Large world  Random Encounters (Feral Animals/Weather/Other Civilizations) Resource Depletion Sense of wonder! To get these implemented might prove challenging, though with some better assets the sense of wonder can easily be achieved with "the money shot"* Designer Note: The "money shot" for lack of a better idiom is generally used for that awe-struck moment a player sees something cool, this is generally easier to do in First Person or Third Person games due to lighting/player vision and forced direction for the player (mostly linear, but non-linear works too). Now, I've never seen this in RTS style games, as generally the environments are static and there's other th...

A lot of progress has been made on laying the foundation of this project. First and foremost, the assets needed a lot of work ( hey they were free, so I can't complain) so I got started on that, but I'll talk about that more down the blog. Step 1: General functionality. In the last update I got the WASD movement for the camera and bound the mouse for edge scroll. This working nicely, but I will improve on that later. I needed to get to grips with the ability to create objects and place them in the world. For this (As I wanted to eventually place a lot of buildings) I made the foundation functions, primarily, "If button is pressed > create a ghost instance of a build > depending on the button clicked will change the static mesh of the building that will be placed. For generic flow, I used a Square and Pyramid to differentiate between the two objects i was placing; This was mainly to allow for non overlap systems and multiple buttons. Disclaimer: There is a l...

Blog regarding an overly ambitious Real Time Strategy game/learning experience using unreal engine 4. I've wanted to create an RTS for quite a while, though with work and lack of hard coding knowledge, there was always a mental blocker of time vs learning vs wanting to have fun! That being said, a lot of reasoning as prompted the excelled learning ambitions to take hold, as such, with the help of the internet; I shall attempt to bring a small portion of my ideas to life. Initial issues! My main reasoning for not wanting to create small projects on my own was simple: I lacked assets! Sure, I could have made my own, but I'm not a great 3d artist, I can create assets, but it's time consuming to gather the reference, block out the model, unwrap and texture etc etc. This, coupled with my idealogy of wanting my content to look somewhat presentable disheartened me to start/created/finish even a small project. With that being said, and scouring multiple sources - even things ...

So wrapping up my Final Year Project! Alot has been done over the last 2 weeks, WASD is working fluidly, Left Click attack now follows the players cursor properly, scripts are working etc etc etc. Only issue I couldn't solve was the boss mechanics, but I have time for expotees to finish that off. So, to summarize on the project for now: Final year project by Donny Evason for Teesside University. For my final year project I created a total conversion game for Starcraft 2. Utilizing the Galaxy Engine I created a third person, point and click shooter. The player must explore the facility known as Tempest, discover the fate of the laboratory and find any survivors. Collect specimen samples, prototype weapons and battle a variety of laboratory creatures. Project Tempest is designed to be a visually stimulating level, with fast paced combat and a plethora of enemies to fight. I've rendered out a full playthrough video:  sadly the trailer will not be completed until ExpoTees...

Not posted in a while due to crazy work amount and really not too much to show with fixing all the scripting issues that were occurring. Anyway, lots to show and talk about so I created a video for viewing - bare in mind it still has a lot of polish to get it a better working state: Skip to around 1 minute ish mark for gameplay start (I had published the game so I recorded accessing it through the client) On with the ramblings. A few people have tested the map and reported similar issues, the controls being clunky and it being difficult to shoot, though the movement is out of my control due to the engine being an RTS (and my limited coding knowledge) I've forced the movement to work in WASD with W always being North facing in the map etc etc. This works fine, but takes some getting used to for the most part. Some additions have been made for enemy placement and polish to some of the areas with limited assets. I've added additional doodads into make the areas slightly dif...

More work has gone into the scripted events and other areas that require attention outside of asset placement and level flow. Firstly point placement and pathing painting for AI/Player character was mostly finished. Whilst most of the assets have some form of collision, it was based around right click movement, due to my WASD controls I don't need to right click (that would usually result in the player not being able to move to a point if a collision is detected) so collision is not picked up on a lot of the assets.  To rectify this I could "paint" the pathing for the player and AI. The red sections on the images are showing the areas the player cannot walk too and the green area allows pathing - The lack of green areas was due to a bounding issue with the map creation, I needed to create an exception area for the player to be able to walk due to unknown reasons the player couldn't walk freely around the area. Points The above image is showcasing some...