Lifeguarding
Week 1
This week we were given a task to create a game concept for us to create in the next few weeks. My group consists of five people. Eoghan Brady, Isaac Smith, Jamie Braniff, Mumo Ali and myself, we have taken this week to create an idea for our game as well as determine our roles within our games creation.
The game we have decided to create is an educational game, the aim of our game is to make our players aware of how to preform life saving techniques if they ever find themselves in the situation where they will need to help someone in need.
As there are so many roles that are included in making a game, we all have at least two roles, the roles I have been assigned within our group is the character designer, this also doubles as creating the NPC characters and patients in our game, I am also creating the UI we will be using.
When I was aware of my role within our group I wanted to make a base for the main character. First of all I researched what type of art style we wanted for our game, I chose to use a website called 'Miro' to get an idea of what I wanted to make our characters and NPCs look like in game.
After feedback from others within my group and we all agreed with the art style I chose I decided to create some concept art to help me visualise what I wanted my character to look like in Maya. I decided to get a head start in 'Maya' to start to block out my characters face shape.
I decided to get a head start in 'Maya' to start to block out my characters face shape.
After I had received feedback from other group members and they informed me that they liked my design and I chose to keep on working and expanding my ideas and creativity into the character's design.
As this is a group project I wanted to get more feedback from my other group members before I proceeded any further regarding the face. I chose to add a body to the character so that my peers could see how it would look as not just a head.
This was where I finished off with this week in terms of Character Design.
My group and I had a meeting where we went over everything we wanted our UI to cover and from this talk we decided to have two UI screens, one for the overall gameplay and one for the emergency situation.
These are the rough sketches we decided on, we also agreed that for the Emergency UI we should have a faded pause button and the lifeguard book would fade in colour to connotate to the player that they are inoperable in Emergency mode.
Another thing that we discussed was the NPC characters, we realised that our patients would need different types of care depending on who it is, for this reason we decided to have one female NPC, one Male NPC, one Child NPC and one infant NPC, I drew some concept art for this so that we could have get an idea of what we wanted them to look like.
Week 2
This week we had a pitch presentation for our game and overall the feedback we received was good however there were some minor adjustments that we wanted to make to our game after the feedback we were given. As a group we all decided to sit down and discuss everything we had heard from our feedback and we made a list of everything we "Must have, Should have, could have and won't have" this was a good strategy for us to look at to make sure that we weren't over soaping our game.
Week 3
This week my group and I had a meeting in order to create our Unreal Engine Project, we have chosen to use 'Git HUB' to allow us all to access our project however we did have some issues with setting it up on everyone's laptops, we experienced some issues with some of us using drobox and others not this took us a while to figure out but we got there in the end.
Week 4
This week my group and I had a progress presentation, through this presentation I realised that I needed a lot more work to be done as I hadn't realised that my group as a whole was behind other groups within our class.
This was when I realised that my group and I didn't know what page we were all really on and therefore we all had different views for the direction of our game through this information we have realised that we needed to all have a sit down talk and discuss what we wanted to accomplish when making our game and also the overall principle of our lifeguarding game.
Moving forward I had chosen to add more to my character model I added the characters arms and legs.
I also created UI wireframes for the UI overlay for both the overworld and for the emergency mode. I then started to make these in Figma for us to later use in game.
I used this wireframe as a base for the UI I will using for the HUD in game. I also created the wire frames as well as some scamps for the HUD UI and this wireframe was the one was the one we agreed as a group should be our base.
After our group meeting this week we decided that the players movement button was going to conflict with the players experience of the game therefore we decided to move on to create a new wireframe as well as including some new game elements.
For this we as a group decided to remove the joystick and make the game on a 'touch to move' movement strategy, we determined that this would create more efficient movement and gameplay, as well as allowing the player effectively their surroundings. We also decided to add a journal in the top left corner to portray the narrative and instructions of the game.
Week 5
This week I decided to carry on with my character design. I added the feet to the character as well as the characters lower arms and hands. After discussing with my group we determined that this would be my character base and from this I decided to duplicate the model to make the NPC characters we would need in game.
After duplicating I decided to add hair to the small child NPC after sizing it down and the same for the baby model.
Week 6
This week I decided to mainly focus on UI and focus on the pause screen and the low-fidelity wireframe for the HUD.
I created the black and white version of the pause menu and I discussed with my group and we all agreed upon the decision to make this the official pause screen for the game.
After creating this screen I decided to work on the official colour pallet I planned to use to bring the screen to life whilst keeping in theme with the game we aim to create.
Week 7
This week I used the colour palette I made for the home screen and made the home pause in colour ready to be used in game. I also spoke collaborated with Issac to speak about how we wanted these to be implemented in game and I suggested about the background being a blur behind the UI to make the pause screen more prominent.
I also decided to create the home screen for the game using a similar structure to keep the overall design consistent.
After creating these screens I had developed my skills in 'Figma' further and I decided to attempt to recreate the anchor using a vector to better create and symbolise an anchor.
Week 8
This week we had a presentation during this presentation our lectures mentioned how the anchor didn't really fit the theme of our game and therefore we decided to switch out the anchor and I chose to use vectors in Figma to create a radio as they are typically used by lifeguards to reach help if they need it.
Week 9
This week we had presentation to be honest this wasn't the best presentation we've had and it was pointed out to me that I had over loaded myself with things to do in 3 weeks. It was advised that I scrap the character as being both the character and the UI artist was already a lot of work and I was overloading my plate especially for such a small timeframe.
When I was creating the radio it was suggested to me to create a 3D opening screen using a water shader to create a new screen.
I used the water shader to create a water background and place for items to be set.
When I first got this pack I chose to change the colour of the water as it looked like swamp water as opposed to swimming pool water, and this is how it turned out.
Week 10
This week we decided as a group that there were things that we really needed in terms of UI design, for example, for narrative Issac needed to implement into the story how the player was going to 'go to work', at first they decided to use a scroll for this to give the message for the player.
However, while I was drawing this, I thought more about it and reaslied that it would make more sense for the player to be told about this through a text message as I thought it would be more like realalistic. My other group members agreed so then I decided to make a phone in Figma.
While I was making the phone I decided to consult my other group members to ensure that they approved of the style I was using before I added more detail.
After adding more detail to the phone I realised that as the phone screen was blank we were going to need text bubbles to further convey to the players that this is a text message.
I created 3 text bubbles and 1 reply bubble so that Issac's narrative wouldn't be restricted by the size of the text bubble.
I also created a Journal for the journal widget Issac was planning to use in game. At first I made a black and white version so that I would visualise how it would look before adding the element of colour.
After confirming with my group that they were all on board with the design I carried on to add colour to it completing the design.
Week 11
This week I chose to get to work on the 3D Lifeguarding title screen, I choose to use Illustrator to make the text 3D in order to implement it into unreal.
At first I used this font however in game it conflicted with the water shader so therefore I decided to switch to a more simple font.
After I created the 3D font I implemented it into Unreal Engine for Issac to merge the files and to script the scene.
I also added some of Mumo's props to the scene to make the scene seem more structured.
Week 12
This week is our final week, originally we had planned to keep the buttons 2D however this wasn't working out as well as we had planned. So therefore I decided to make the play and quit buttons in 3D form to fit the rest of the scene.
I started off by creating the buttons in Maya and using illustrator to make 3d text before combing the two to make the buttons before transferring them over to substance painter to colour and texture them.
In Substance Painter I painted the two buttons and exported them ready to be put into the Unreal Engine software.
