Interactive Media

1.1:

I have been tasked by Umbrella Interactive Studios to create a interactive media of my choosing. We must create a interactive product to promote a clients product, I have decided to use the Unreal Engine as it is much simpler to use than say Unity or Animate and comes with free assets and textures which can make the interactive media I plan on creating look amazing. As I am a gamer myself I feel brave in saying that my interactive media will be satisfy the needs of gamers and show that Unreal Engine is easy for anyone looking to create the next ‘Triple A’ title. However, with only having 4 weeks and only a minor amount of knowledge on how to create environments, foliage, character animation and so on, I am worried that I will not be able to make as good a interactive media as I believe I can in my mind.

To tackle this I will continue to practice using UDK and figuring out all of its little quirks, while also maintaining a steady time management to make sure I will complete my project in time.

1.2:

When it comes to different Game Development Software there are many different options to choose from, such as:

•  Unity
• Game Maker
• Frostbite
• Animate
• Unreal Engine

Unity is a cross platform game engine which was developed by Unity Technologies. It was first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Inc’s Worldwide Developers conference. The engine can be used to create three-dimensional games, two-dimensional games and simulations for its many platforms. As of 2018, the engine has been extended to support 27 platforms. Popular games created in Unity are:

• Kerbal Space Program
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
• Wasteland 2
• Battlestar Galactica Online
• Rust
• Temple Run Trilogy
• 7 Days to Die
• Robocraft
• Slender: The Arrival
• Fallout Shelter
• Firewatch
• Pokemon Go
• Superhot

Frostbite is a game engine developed by EA DICE, designed for cross-platform use on Microsoft Windows, seventh generation game consoles PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and the eighth generation game consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game engine was originally employed in the Battlefield video game series, but would later be expanded to other first-person shooter video games and a variety of other genres. To date, Frostbite has been exclusive to video games published by Electronic Arts. Here are popular games created using the Frostbite Engine:

• Anthem
• The Battlefield Series
• Dragon Age: Inquisition
• FIFA 17 – 19
• Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2
• Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

Unreal Engine is a game engine created by Epic Games. It was first showcased with the 1998 first person shooter game Unreal. Although the game engine was primarily developed for the first person shooter genre, the engine has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, fighting, MMORPG’s and other RPG titles. Here are a list of games created using the Unreal Engine:

• Fortnite
• Borderlands 2
• Kingdom Hearts 3
• Bioshock Series
• Killing Floor
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist
• Batman Arkham Series
• Gears of War Series
• Days Gone
• Dragon Ball FighterZ
• Jump Force
• Injustice 2
• We Happy Few

When it comes to which software I will be using to create my video game I have decided that I am going to stick with using the Unreal Engine. I know about Unity however with Unity it is much more complicated than Unreal as Unreal does most of the coding for you however with Unity you must create all the coding yourself and it is a much longer and stressful process to create a single level let alone a full game.

The game I would like to create is a game idea me and my friend Connor came up with in college last year on Level 2 for a assignment we had to complete. The game was an exploration game inspired by the Indian culture where they would take psychedelics to (in their eyes) see what the afterlife had in store for them. The player would explore this vast world not knowing where or who they are, they would have to complete platform puzzles or just puzzles to activate these totems that would show them a hints to where they are and who they are, after completing the game it would then go into a cut scene where you are show a tribe leader on his death bed, he has taken psychedelics to find what his life in the afterlife will be like and find his true self, he then passes and his spirit which is the character you have been playing as this entire time, leaves his body and floats into the afterlife.

This game Idea came from my friend Connor who was a fan of the game ‘Journey’ and wanted to replicate the feeling he had from that game into his own. He was a fan of the native american tribes and wanted to use their culture of how they used psychedelics into a game and we both helped with ideas, I created the design of the characters, the overall look of the game and came up with the character of Acheri as I read up about the reading up about this spirit of american native folklore.

Here are some of the game sales from games that inspired this project.

Journey – £170,000 total across the the world.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/45780/journey/?region=All

The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (GameCube) – £4,600,000 total across the world.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/2400/the-legend-of-zelda-the-wind-waker/

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – £9,460,000 total across the world.

Here is some concept art we created for the game:

Here is a game outline taken from the pre – production of the work we created last year:

“Second Realm is a 3rd person exploration game with hidden objects like stone guardians, totems, creatures, and beings to see. You also complete puzzles around the map which give you different clues and hints on who you are, where you are and why. Depending on what part of the map you are on the creatures and beings you meet will be different and the same goes for the locations style for where the totems and secrets you can find are found. At night a ghostly female figure named Acheri who in native American Indian folklore would come down from the mountain hilltops and bring sickness and death to people who she touched with her shadow. In the game she hunts you down until your glow over powers her, you have no way of fighting her except for running, if she catches you in her shadow you will have a chance to escape you will be considerably slower in speed and if she catches you in her shadow for too long your body will collapse to the floor and you will start from where you began.” Cerig Davies

Here is the story line for the game:

“The story of Second Realm starts with a glowing entity waking up in a patch of grass, you walk forward up a hill where you see glowing lights emanating from different locations in the world, some closer than others, you follow a path down the mountain and you can explore the world at will, you’ll find totems and walls which have text carved in them which can be read to give you clues on where you are and who you are. The lights emanating from various places are locations with obstacle course and puzzles to complete to reach bigger clues that will help you reach the end where you find out where you are, who you are and how you came to be there. There are also random locations not marked with light to find which activate hidden events or give you more information on what this strange world is etc.

At night a ghostly female figure named Acheri who in native American Indian folklore would come down from the mountain hilltops and bring sickness and death to people who she touched with her shadow. In the game she hunts you down until your glow over powers her, you have no way of fighting her except for running, if she catches you in her shadow you will have a chance to escape you will be considerably slower in speed and if she catches you in her shadow for too long your body will collapse to the floor and you will start from where you began.

Once you complete all the puzzles, obstacle courses and then read the last totem of information you leave and walk back across the land when colours and bit of the landscape pieces like trees, stones etc start to fade away around you and your start to stumble and become weak until everything around becomes a white space. You fall to yours knees and collapse on the floor. The entity then fades into an Indian and the white space slowly transforms into a scenery where an Indian tribe sits around a campfire and the entity is the Indian tribe leader who is on his death bed and has taken psychedelics to show himself what the afterlife is before his leaves this world and goes there. He says a few worlds before passing away and the entity slowly floats out of his body and floats into the wind and into the night sky with the stars.” Cerig Davies

 

We were inspired to make a game like this from games such as Journey, The Legend of Zelda – Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild because of their art style, storytelling and over all feel.

Evaluation:

All in all I do like the piece I created however it did not turn out how I envisioned it. During the creation of this project I wanted to make the game look like what me and Connor had imagined, however due to my lack of knowledge and experience in UDK and not having a budget to go off of I could not make it look like the surreal land I had hoped and made more of a fantasy village. Even though it does not look like how imagined I do like what I produced, It looks very much like a fantasy village with a waterfall, houses, a well etc and does look in my opinion really good. If I was to create a game again I would give myself more time focusing on the world building aspect but due to the time constraint that was an issue, also my interest in programming animations and creating characters to attack more than the world building was at fault also. When it came to the research, in truth, I found it very boring. When it comes to creating a game, film and other creative medias I much prefer the practical than doing all this paperwork. I know that in education we need this paperwork to show we understand and that it needs to be marked but, I do find it unnecessary. However, I did find out information about certain game development software, sales figures, and pre production tips that I would not have know about otherwise so for that I am glad. At the start of the course I created this game to test out what I could create in Unreal, I practiced creating mountains with the sculpt tool, how to create foliage, planes for paths etc and really enjoyed making it, however it was not what I was planning on making. Originally I decided to create a Neo Tokyo/Blade Runner style world and began creating the world immediately. During the creation of the game I found it difficult to create the structure I wanted and make it look like a dystopian world due to my lack of knowledge to make structures like that in Unreal and primarily used structures that had already been creating in marketplace, so I decided to create a world based on the game me and my friend made. I created a new project and quickly started to sculpt the landscape. Now I know what I envisioned it to look like in my head however making that in Unreal was much more challenging, it was hard to create the world on such a large with clear points on where to go without having the tools and content to make it, so I decided to use the world I had created as a test map, as it was small enough to build in and explore, while having something that looked appealing to the audience and have the same feel as the original idea. Even though as I said previously it did not look exactly as the world I had planned and was more of a stereotypical fantasy world I still think it turned out looking like an actual game world even with missing pieces here and there.