Unreal Engine 4 & Maya: Project Daybreaker Evaluation

Unreal Engine 4 & Maya: Project Evaluation

The game in recent days has finally started to wrap up development and at this point it is a good time to look back at the good and bad things that have happened during the development process of the game. This will range from all the new programs used to the brand new things I have learnt during the project and finally to stuff I would change if I did the project again and how this project has helped with my skills.

Unreal Engine 4

With this being the main program that has been used throughout development and with another engine to compare it to this engine has a lot of new things to show compared to what unity has to offer, I have compared tools throughout the blogging process to show a difference between the tools and the upsides and downsides to each engine. 

The reasoning behind some of the ideas I had done for the game by making it Stealth based and using AI is to learn more complicated features of the engine since the way the game is coded being block based and with the template it seemed a bit too easy but adding in new complicated features like AI and even ammo were fun to learn and interesting to also try out. 

AI was the most interesting feature to work with since I learned about features inside Unreal Engine like pawn sensing and also making the enemy follow certain pawn sensors once it had been seen, in this case it was the player and it also made for interesting level design. Ammo was interesting to learn as well since that is the main component of any FPS game and having an ammo counter sparked strategy and timing to make sure you have enough bullets for a situation and for the main game idea of limited ammo it helped a lot otherwise the game could be beaten easily by shooting every single enemy.

Other features I came to learn was with the Widgets what allowed menu's to appear, These allowed the game to have a flow from menu to menu allowing the game to be one big loop code wise that would only break once the player had quit the game. This also tied into learning about Trigger Boxes, This tool would activate once a certain object has passed through it, in this case the player would trigger the completion menu to appear at the end.

The issues that I have experienced with the game over time is glitches with the AI where they will get stuck in walls at points and the timing of the AI can also be pretty off from play session to play session. Another issue is that the music doesn't work properly, it only works on a delay of a few seconds and when outside of the pawn sensor for the enemy, the reason for why this happens is unknown still by myself after multiple attempts at fixing the blueprint.

Maya

Maya being a new piece of software to, but having some experience with the animation side of I had some experience with the interface but the modelling side was still a bit new to me with some of the tools at hand with mainly using them with certain tutorials that have been provided to me along with some of the tools that I had learn from the lectures.

Some of the tools used here are justified to help make the models more efficient and to make it look decent enough to put into the game for example the extrude tool allowed me to help make some extra details on the gun while keeping the model efficient to mainly one block along with the multi cut tool to allow to make the model to have a more accurate and smoother shape. There is also the bridge and connect tool to make any holes that have been made in the model connected and filled up to so there isn't any holes.

The issues that came along during development of the model was working within the shape and the tedious parts of modelling smaller details. The main issue came when the model had to be UV mapped before it eventually went to just using the materials and colouring them in, When UV mapping the program would crash and wouldn't set a UV map of the main model. This issue did have some set backs during development with some progress being set back. There wasn't much more issues with Maya with how simple the usage of the tools was.

The Main Project

The project as a whole I think went well with the content it required and the new tools and techniques learned because of this along with making a brand new solo project on a brand new engine was interesting to work with and making self made models that were also used in the game. If the project was done again in the future there is some changes that I would like to make and that would be with the gun, maybe trying to make something that is more unique and stylized compared to just using a regular looking gun.

Other changes would be making a more reliance on multiple genres instead of a obstacle course maybe have a mix of stealth, obstacle course with some puzzles thrown in to always keep the player occupied and focused on what will come next in the game. The final change I would also change is to also have a mixture of weapons for the game so the player would be switching out weapons with other weapons to deal with situations.

This project though has interested me a lot to pursue further development of the game in my free time to make this a proper project and potentially add some of the changes I have stated earlier and also to further learn more about 3D modelling and help build the skills more for future projects that could involve 3D modelling.

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