Sound of Life – More Sequences

Hallo Everyone!

I’m back and our game “Sound of life” has started taking shape! We have been working hard for a couple of weeks now and it feels good that we are getting somewhere. But let’s start talking about what I have been doing.

I have continued my work on sequences by adding more more of them, one for every survivor and I also added a end sequences. The new digging sequences are similar to the actress sequence, Tracks, fade and spawning actors. But I did also add some music to make them feel more alive. Some voice lines was also added but I will talk about that in an later post.

But this takes use to the new end sequence. It will play when the player have run out of time or found all the survivors. This sequence was filmed in its own level, the level was a smaller replica of the games starting area. This was done for two reasons, the graphical people could now work in the main scene whiteout any risk of collisions and I could do whatever I wanted to make the sequence look pretty.

The the end sequences exist of three shots, one of the desk in the rescue station, one of the notice board and last a shot of the fountain. Then I created a spawn actor, this is just an ordinary actor that would spawn pictures on the desk and board depending on who was found in the main level. I used a object called Game Instance, it could be used to store data in between levels which is pretty handy. The fountain shot dose not change depending on your performance however. This is suppose to represent all the people that you cant save.

After the sequence the player is sent back to the starting menu. The menu is also in its own level but this is just used so a new player can come and play. The camera is mounted on the head of an idle animation so that we get some movement in the menu. Then their is a widget that contains the Sound of Life logo and the text “press any key to start”. I don’t think I need to explain what happens after you press a button.

But this is one of the things I have been doing and I will be back soon with more, to be more exact how our games notice board work, see you later.

 

 

Sound of Life – Digging sequence

Hallo everyone!

I’m back and this time I will talk about the “digging” in our game. When you think that you have wound a survivor you will have to dig them up. It is just one thing, you are not actually digging and their is a simple explanation for why, we do not have the time. We only have eight weeks to make the game and we did not want to spend have of that on a digging mechanic. Instead all digging will be done with help of cinematics/Sequences.

By using Unreal Engine 4 Sequence editor we could create our own cinematics. I did this by first creating an level sequence called “Actress_Sequence” this would act as the master sequence when it came to the wounding of our actress survivor. The only thing it contained was an shot track which gives able you to add shots. By using shots you will able to keep a better track on what is going on in the sequence and it is easy to reorganize if you feel that some is wrong or missing. But to be able to reorganize we first need some shots to play with.

Shots is actually level sequences so to create a shot you just have to make a new level sequence. I created three new sequences that would play when Actress_Sequence was called.

The first shot was a fade shot. it contained the player camera and a fade track. This was here to make a smooth transition from play to cinematic. We also plan to add sound and audio in a later stage so the player can easier understand what is happening. The second shot was a camera that was fixed in position and it was over looking our square and some broken building, it also had a fade track. We will later during this shot move our sun to show the player that time has passed. The third shot is when you find and then meet the survivor. It contained the actress, camera and a fade track. the actress was a spawnable, a spawneble object only exists in the sequence so that means that the actress wont be in the scene  after the sequence finish. the shot s camera was also moving along a track to simulate the player moving towards the actress. After that the camera fades out and the player can resume playing the came. The whole Actress_Sequence takes at the moment 18 seconds to finish.

That what I’m been doing and I need to create sequences for all survivors and also one when you don’t fine someone. But that will have to wait until our level is finished and I know where all the survivors will be located.

 

Sound of Life – Sensors, Materials and Widgets

Hallo everyone! in this post I’m going to talk about the gameplay in Sound of Life and what we need to make it work. I’m also going to talk a bit about widgets in Unreal Engine 4 and how we are planing to use them.

Lets start by explaining our gameplay. You play as a rescue worker and your job is to place sensors to try to locate people that are trapped underground. So the First thing I had to was to make the player be able to place sensors. I did this by activating an reycast at button press and the spawn an sensor actor on the point of collision if it collides. An impotent thing to think about when you spawn actors whit a static mesh component is to know where the objects pivot point is located. The actor will spawn at it’s pivot point so if it is in the center you will have half of what you asked for. After that is done you have to change it rotation so rotated in the right way, and with that I mean not always straight up.

So now when we know that the actor will spawn in the right place we have to make sure that the player know whats happening. this is done by spawning a ghost with the same mesh as the sensor so that the player can see where the sensor is going to be spawn. I also made two new materials, one green that is placed on the ghost when a sensor can be placed and one red material for the opposite. This makes the placement of sensors easier to understand.

But it is not enough just placing sensors, you want to be able to pick them up as well. So I added function that destroys a sensor if you look at it and press an button. It worked fine but now the game needed a way tell the player what he/she was looking at. The solution for this was to add an outline when the player was hovering over the object. The problem with this was that it was hard to see so instead we added a material that lerpt a colors transparency so it looked like blinking.

Now when you can see if you are looking at a sensor it would be nice to see where you are looking. So I added an crosshair in the center of the screen and after that I added an animation that will play when you look at an sensor. The crosshair is made in a widget and the widget is called on when you are hovering over the sensors. It is made out of four images that just changes location depending on which animation is playing. Creating an widget is one way of creating a HUD in unreal. This dose not work that good because it is animations so it finish one animation before starting the other. So this will be changed to work similarity to our crouch function in an later date.

Sound of Life – The beginning

Hallo everyone! My name is Emil Wahlund and I’m a member of the group !false and we are working on a concept called Sound of Life. In the game you plays as a rescue worker in an bombed city and your mission is to find people that has been buried under collapsed buildings. You do this by listening through sensors to try to pinpoint their location so that they can be rescued. I’m the lead designer in the group and also one of only two programmers. We are working in Unreal Engine 4 and the game is played in first person.

So now when everyone know the basics I can start talking about what I have been doing. The first thing we needed to have in our game was movement and we also had to decide what kind of movement. We decided to have a simple movement system, walking where the mouse is used for guidance and a crouch mode. Unreal provide a couple of templates and functions that contain different types of movement but they are not that good. They have a crouch function that set a new capsule and camera height but that does not contain a smooth transition.

So I started working on a new crouch function and it was more complicated then I first would thought. First I used a simple raycast to see if something was above the player. The player could not uncrouch as long as the raycast detected a hit. If nothing was detected the player could uncrouch and that would be done by a timeline so that the player got a smooth transition up or down. The problem with this was that the raycast was located at the top of capsule/player so it was a chance that player would get stuck if he/she stopped moving after an crouched area. The player could also not interrupter the transitions.

So I made a new function with help from our lead coder. The transitions are now updated by delta seconds so the player can now interrupt an crouching transition or an uncrouching transition. I also added more raycasts to reduce the getting stuck risk. Now all the raycast needs to return false to letting the player return to hes/shes original height. This work much better! the player does not get stuck often and it feels like you have more controller now when you can interrupt crouching. There are still some bugs where the player get stuck but that will be fixed in a later date.