Coffin Bound Games

Having finished modelling the bridge it was time to make the world for the bridge to go in. The most important feature of the map is to make the river for the bridge to go over [although at this stage it is just a large ravine until I get any water in] The hardest part of this stage was modelling the parts of the map that player would actually be walking on since it's hard to get a sense of scale when flying around in editor view compared to actually playing it. I'm currently working on texturing for the landscape, since grey squares doesn't match the vission.

 It dawned on me pretty quickly that if I was to make a level based around the tees transporter bridge it would be important that I had an actual model of the bridge. The problem there, no model was readily available online and not wishing to pay a free lancer my only option was to model the bridge myself. At first this was an incredibly daunting task since, after performing extra research, it became apparent that the bridge is absolutely massive. However luckily for me the Victorians had a very distinctive style of construction, that is lots and lots of small simple to manufacture pieces bolted together to make one enormous structure [think Meccano on a giant scale] meaning that the same principles can be applied to modelling it digitally. 

 In the last part I mentioned doing a level set in a gloomy, fog filled level but was still lacking inspiration for any kind of set piece for the gameplay to revolve around. Since then I've been lucky enough to bare witness to  Mackenzie Thorpe's eerie  painting 'Heart Of The North', a painting of the Tees transporter bridge rising out of a gloomy, foggy foreground. My only worry is that thematically a spooky foggy level would be quiet similar to a mission design module that I made recently and am planning to put into my portfolio [which is probably what inspired me to want to make a spooky foggy level]. Although there's always a way to make the lighting different enough to be distinct it ultimately shouldn't matter too much, as this is a game design portfolio what really matters is the gameplay design.

For my portfolio module I'm required to create an artefact specially for my portfolio. Since I'm on the game design coarse I will be following the very broad designers brief [which essentially allows me to design anything for any genre or style of game] As interested as I am with designing an A.I. system I will probably be going down the level design route for several reasons. First of which, I already have a rough plan of what I want to design for a level and secondly because although online portfolios can support video demonstrations it's a lot harder to show off A.I. in a visual format [although there will always be someone who properly appreciates some nicely written C#] So the rough idea is to create a level for a first person horror game, since in the last module I was tasked with making a mission for an FPS horror game and got interested in using the lighting, fog, and particles in Unreal. Although I still need to find a subject or idea for the level to revolve aroun...

And voila, the fence demo. Although a lot more polished than it necessarily needs to be, the video articulately displays the differences that the implementation that the fence mechanic would have in total war.  

 Finally, we have our video clips and its time to turn them into a cinematic masterpiece. I started by slapping the clips straight into windows movie maker [an extremely restricting program but I couldn't get after effects to work with my laptops video card] I trimmed the clips down, removing the parts where unity would take a while to boot up. I also had to reshoot some scenes, either because notifications where popping up or I just didn't like the camera angle. The final video did go through a few revisions, as originally I felt that it didn't contain enough information and couldn't stand alone without the report, so I went back and added several more captions to describe in more detail what was going on in the video and what Id spent the last few months of my life on. I then exported the film in two different levels of detail [as this effects the file size, I didn't want to have a film so big that I'd have to go back, open up the movie maker file again and re...

So, finally, I got the gubbins moving around and doing what we want, so now I've got to record everything to show off how smart I am. For this we're going to need some screen recording software, and since I don't have any money it seems smartest to use a free option, for example OBS. It did take a while to get working thou, since OBS works by recording off of the graphics card, but since my laptop uses two cards I had to go into settings and tell OBS where to record off of. After that it was as simple setting up the cameras and letting unity play out, showing how the barrier has an affect on the chariots [since that's the mechanic that we're trying to sell here]