Unit 3 FMP
• Aim
To develop your skills of independent enquiry by undertaking a sustained investigation of direct relevance to their vocational, academic and professional development.
• Unit abstract
This unit provides opportunities for you to develop skills in decision making, problem solving and communication, integrated with the skills and knowledge developed in many of the other units within the programme to complete a realistic project.
It requires you to select, plan, implement and evaluate a project and finally present the outcomes, in terms of the process and the product of the project. It also allows you to develop the ability to work individually and/or with others, within a defined timescale and given
constraints, to produce an acceptable and viable solution to an agreed brief.
If this is a group project, each member of the team must be clear about their responsibilities at the start of the project and supervisors must ensure that everyone is accountable for each aspect of the work and makes a contribution to the end result.
Learners must work under the supervision of programme tutors or work-based managers.
Project Endeavour
Unit 3 of our HND course required us to create a game level for our FMP (Final Major Project). The start of this development involved us assembling a team of developers with skills that complement one another which allowed for fluid workflow and smooth communication between the different departments of the “studio”. The concept for the game was a First Person Puzzle Game set aboard a Starship called the “Endeavour”. The objective is for the player to obtain an AI Data Core from the Command Bridge and reach the airlock while uncovering the mystery behind your crews disappearance and the damage sustained to the ship.
Pre-Production
At the beginning of the term we had no idea what we wanted to create for our FMP so we brainstormed ideas for the game that were feasible for the time-frame we had and the experience we all had with the different software and engines. Initially we decided to create our game in the Unity Engine because we had the most experience with it at the time and had a lot of resources that we could utilise in the engine such as plugins and asset packs.
We had an idea for how we wanted the level to play and had a storyboard to assist with the designing of the level.
Disclaimer: The following paragraphs will be from the perspective of different members or the Endeavour Team
Production
During the production phase I was level designer and ensured that the level flowed well and that there weren't any game breaking glitches. Initially I designed the basic layout of the ship and handed that design to our concept artist Caroline, ensured that any and all design changes still fitted into the narrative of the level and was still fun to play. After that initial phase my role was to 3D model props that could be seen in the environment and to ensure the quality of the scene from both an aesthetic and gameplay perspective. - Dan
After the initially brainstorming sessions, we had a lot of great concept art to work from, so I got started in modelling a 3D iteration of my favourite piece of concept art.
The model I created was used as a major part of the project and also a basis for the ships' design. Soon after, we went through a few iterations of the layout of the ship, first having a drawn concept by Daniel which was then re-drawn and built upon by Caroline. I used the completed layout to make a 3D layout for the ship that we can use from that point onward to fill the scene, flesh out the game. From this point on my focus was on ensuring that others work was able to fit properly with in the context of the project. Because most of the people working on the project had less experience in this aspect of production and weren't aware of how different pieces of software work and what constraints there are to making assets work in different software.- Harri
Once the models were created, I was required by the team to put everything together into an engine to make a playable game. I specialise in Unreal Engine 4 blueprints, so the idea of having many assets ready to be used for a puzzle game was irresistible. I imported the FBX content into UE4 and quickly got started on the programming. As the models had been textured in Substance Painter using Unity presets, there were a few problems with importing the textures into UE4, so while the team helped with getting the textures imported properly, I created blueprints in placeholder actors that would quickly be changed once the correct models were in the engine. The main focus of the game was to escape a destroyed ship, so my main task was to make the player have to find objects to open doors, use elevators and ultimately find a way out of the ship. I achieved this by assigning intractable objects with tags so that UE4 has a way of interacting with specific items. For example, the first step is to find a keycard and use it in a keycard scanner to open a door. The keycard has the tag ‘key’ and when the player inputs ‘E’ into the keyboard, it will fire a line trace and if it hits an actor with the tag ‘key’, it will play the custom event. This is replicated for every step and is even used to display widgets when the player hovers over an intractable object.
My other job was to give the impression the ship was about to blow up. I achieved this by adding a camera shake every 10-15 seconds once a certain stage had been met. I also set certain areas on fire using the preset fire particle emitters in UE4. - Jack
Over the course of 3 months our team developed a game that we were happy to demonstrate and plan on expanding on after the course finishes. Towards the end of the project we did a quick change to the Unreal Engine and took on an Unreal Specialist to help us meet our Deadline. We feel that there is a lot of potential in what we were developing and hope to see it published in some form or another. Working on this game together has given us a lot of insight into how game development workflows operate.