Advanced Games Dev (AGD) Week # 4

A lot of progress has been made in terms of production for our group for AGD within the last week. After the initial presentations for other AGD groups, we got a look at our progression compared to theirs.

To start the week of, as a producer I've been micro managing the team as a whole and providing any information needed of me, first off was a break down of what we will need for our presentation (December 2nd) and our first demo hand in (November 21st). Initially I began with the animation pipeline, this will be my main concern throughout the AGD module due to the amount of animations we require but only having one animator within our group. To help our animator I have created a breakdown of the animations we need for our first hand in, and what we should be able to achieve by our presentation:

I have put a small amount of animations on the list, due to the short time frame we have and the time it takes for the meshes to be rigged, skinned and hand animated, though I feel these are achievable for our gameplay demo.

Secondly, I have created a project plan to aid our group, although we are mainly using a website called Trello  to track tasks, progression and who is working on certain aspects, we also needed an overall project plan. Here's some samples of our Trello page for the AGD group:

Part of my responsibility as a producer/team lead are to maintain, update and add new tasks and such for our group. Trello allows us to set deadlines, members to work on, priority and checklists. Another example for one of the design cards I have been working on:

As for our project plan, I had to use Microsoft Project to create a more indepth overview of our 9 month project. As such, I won't post loads of images of each indiviual tab and what it contains, but it's extensive and allows the group to get a good idea of where we are in the dev cycle and what they should be working on. With the help of Chris and Cory (The two art leads for Interwire) they will be helping to assign deadlines and milestones for the art pipeline:

As a final note for our meeting this week, we have made the group decision to change engines. Due to some technical issues with programming within Unreal Engine 4, our programming has asked to change to the Unity engine. This was a difficult choice, mainly due to the teams lack of experience with the engine and myself and daz (designer) creating the level blockouts/whiteboxes within UE4 already. Though we aren't too far behind in our pipeline, we could have utilized the last month learning Unity in lieu of UE4. That being said, our programmer and several artists are very comfortable using Unity and this will increase our work capabilities exponentially over the course of the project.

Advanced Games Dev (AGD) week #3

I've started blocking out the initial whitebox for our AGD project within UE4. The main aim to this whitebox is to get a feel for scale, level flow and pacing, as well as creating a foundation to work on with the environment artists. Here's some mock up sketches for the original designs I wanted to implement for our cave/dungeon section for the demo and the first playable level of our project:

The sketches above are just rough variations for the designers (myself and daz) and some of the environment artits, This way we can get an asset list for props we would like through the level as well as getting a good setting for the theme and narrative we want to tell for this part of the level. My preferred level sketch is the second image, I feel the entry way adds some embedded narrative towards the level and offers large enough areas for the player to see the combat system in action; Though during level population I will have to showcase the art assets in a way to get them seen . Here's a quick progression shot for the level in UE4:

Though the level will be added to a lot, this is just a small version of the white box that I will edit heavily. Additionally, I have utilized the blueprint feature within UE4 to begin the basic player movements and camera controls. These were relatively simple to set up due to the project system allowing me to use a top down camera (however, I will be changing the settings at a later date to get a better angle and depth of field to better fit the game genre). Below is a simple screenshot showing the WASD movment controls I've set up using blueprint, these were influenced from looking at the third person shooter project that was available from UE4 and implementing them to the Top Down Project.

Advanced Games Dev (AGD) week #2

Additional information regarding AGD, as the weeks progress the development process is gaining more of a foothold, though we're trying to limit our time on AGD due to the credits being lower than FYP. More brainstorm sessions have occurred between myself and Daz for what we need in the game and where to start working.


I had tasked the artists to come up with more moodboards for environments and character concepts. As such the feedback on our project is great and the artists are eager to get to work. Myself, cory and Chris have set up trello and an asset list to begun production of the demo we are to showcase on December.



Trello is a really useful website for group projects, it allows us to create check lists in detail and designate jobs to team members whilst keeping track of what's complete, or how far into completion it is.

continuing from the last blog update we've begun full development of our idea, the programmer has finally gotten a hole of UE4 and has begun testing our mechanics. Also the core demo features for our presentation have started to take shop, i compiled a list of what we want in the demo and so on: We're aiming for a small teaser video, showcasing the cellar/dungeon and cave area below the castle and some of the King's core mechanics whilst fighting a skeleton enemy. A short teaser of our king:

Advanced Games Development (AGD) week #1

For our Advanced Games Development (AGD) I have created a small team to complete our project. The team consists of 2 designs, 1 animator, 1 programmer and 6 artists. First meeting notes:



The game genre I have started to develop is an isometric Dungeon Crawler. The game will focus on simple combat and have a fantasy theme timed into the art style and game play elements, additionally our aim is to have a comedy aspect to our game by portraying silly humor and breaking the 4th wall for the players.

Myself and Daz Farrell (Additional Designer) have been keeping notes using ever-note from our weekly meetings. Though each meeting is used to discuss additional ideas and the pipeline we will be implementing. For this project we settled on the Dungeon Crawler idea, as well as creating it within Unreal Engine 4. Our aim is to create 3 levels ( 5 - 10 minutes per level play through) that follow a simple narrative (which I'll mention later). For the initial meetings I set the artists to research an art style they would like to emulate for our game, as well as certain environments they would be interested in creating - I feel this achieves more of a personal touch to the development process as the artists are working on assets they find interesting and fun to create, so they will be completed quickly and to an excellent standard.

Myself and Daz started research similar games, to look at unique selling points (USP's) as well as core mechanics, features, narrative, game play and so on. Though we had already settled on a comedy eccentric game, we took inspiration from Wildstar™, Diablo 3™ and The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot™