Game Engines

So game engines... The subject that I don't have too much to say about. Obviously as a part of this course I had the opportunity to work a bit with UDK and Cryengine but unfortunately my experience covers only importing and placing assets. I'll have to work on it over the summer, so I won't waste time on learning the engine basics in the third year. So due to my lack of first-hand knowledge I did a bit of a research and in this post I'll not relate to my own experience too much, but I'll rather rely on information I found on the internet. I'll focus on three leading game engines (UDK, Cryengine and Unity) and  talk a bit about their history and in which games they were used.

But first a few words about game engines in general. What is a game engine? It's a virtual place where game developers put their individual works so they compose into the whole - game. It includes all assets, textures, music, animations, UI, scripts etc. So in a way game engine is like a glue that holds all these elements together. Some companies use already existing engines whereas others create new engines for their games specifically. 

The first engine that I'll talk about is called Unreal Engine. It was developed by American game developed Epic Games and first used in 1998 in game called (surprise, surprise) Unreal. It's core has been written in C++ so it can be used on many different platforms including Windows, iOS, Mac, Xbox and Playstation. That may be one of the main reasons why it's so eagerly used by many game developers. It's been usually used for FPP, MMORPG and RPG games such as Gears of War, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Borderlands, Deus Ex to name just a few. 

 

As I mentioned before I had the opportunity to work with Unreal Development Kit, but unfortunately we haven't become friends. In my opinion it has really ugly and vague interface and when I wanted to explore it, it kept crushing. It happened so many times that now I'm literary afraid to click anything in it.

 

Anyway, the next engine that I also worked with was CryEngine. It was designed by German game developer Crytek, the first game it was used in was Far Cry and it's probably mostly known from Crysis series (cry, cry, cry!). Games created in CryEngine look visually stunning, the lighting is just amazing and outdoor environments look realistic. I have to admit that so far my work with this engine was problem-less, the interface is user friendly and it only crashed twice (well, nobody's perfect).

The last engine that I'll talk about is Unity. Although I never worked with it I have heard quite a lot about it so I decided to mention it as well. It's a quite young engine (2005) by Unity Technologies, that is mostly used by independent and mobile games. I guess that one of the biggest pros of this engine is that it allows in-browser gaming with minimal downloads required.

Obviously these are only few of the existing game engines, all of them have pros and cons, but it's interesting to see how they vary and what they are capable of.    

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryEngine 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity 

Documentation

Documentation. My worst enemy. I've been struggling with it since the first year. I've never got into the habit of writing my design documents along the way of creating actual assets, so I usually have to do it the night before hand-in... And it's really hard to recall and properly describe a month's worth of work in one night.

Although, even that I hate it so much I understand the importance of documentation and why we've been doing it as a part of our course. It's essential in process of game creation. If company hires hundreds of workers it's easy to lose track of who is doing what and whether they are doing it correctly -  so here's where design document comes in handy. 

Here I'm going to make up a game as a practice for my Final Major Project for my third year. Actually it's going to be based on a game that I played as a kid, but I can't recall its title now. I've never been a fan of racing games but I really enjoyed that particular one and I wish someone would do a remake of it.  

Audience: 15+

Genre: sport/racing

Platform: Xbox 360/ PS3

Overview: 

Futuristic, slightly cartoony (similar to Borderlands) hover-board racing game. The main character is a teenager who built his/her own hover-board from scratch and takes part in illegal, amateur midnight races (tutorial part of the game). He/she is really good so he/she gets a chance to take a part in real tournament (main part of the game). The competition is dirty and dangerous, there's only one rule - whoever is the first on the finish line wins the race. The hover-boards are highly customisable and there're also many weapons to be used. 

Lead Character:

customisable, player can chose gender and face characteristics, but it's always a teenager from a lower class family (to support the story)

Outfits and hairstyles can be changed and tattoos and accessories can be added along the way between the stages of tournament. These additions can be purchased for points that player earn by winning races.

 About 8,000 tris

 

 NPC:

Varity of opponents from different social classes (can be distinguished by outfits and hover-boards advance level)

different kinds of enemies with different race styles:

• Tall, slim enemies that prioritize speed
• Big and heavy enemies that trying to knock the player down
• Small enemies that mainly use weapons and traps to eliminate others.

5,000-6,000 tris each

Vehicles:

hover-boards reflect personalities and race styles of their owners.

Player can customise their own by spending points gained on winning races.

Environments:

tutorial part of the game: futuristic but dirty slums areas

main part of the game: variety of racing tracks. Some wild and rough environments like deserts, ice fields, jungles as well as futuristic, technologically advanced racing arenas with holographic billboards and screens.

Many ramps and shortcuts to be discovered by player. 

Props:

Plenty of weapons to choose from like bombs, rockets and traps like force fields.

     

Level design

The subject of this post is level design and in fact I'm quite happy that I'm writing it now instead of in the first term as I was supposed to do. It may sound strange, but the reason behind that is quite simple: in the second term I had the opportunity to work on a group project that was to design and create a game level. Therefore now I've got some experience to which I can relate in this post. So below I'll describe some stages that we went through, things that we had to consider and problems that have occurred along the way of creation of this level.  

The brief was to create a gothic-themed level, so the first (and as I've already said in one of the previous posts - one of the most important) step was research. We wanted to make sure that whatever we would create could be easily recognized as gothic related. Beside of historical and architectural aspects, we looked for examples of gothic themes in literature, film and other video games. After considering different types of gothic environments we could create, we decided to go with manor house. 

Having decided on that we could start doing some initial concepts. Below you can see some created by me.

 

We all agreed that one of the level aspects we wanted to emphasize was mood. So even though we didn't have final concepts ready we were playing with lighting and weather effects like rain and fog in cryengine.   

Just like it would be done in production of real game level we started 3d work with simple level block-out in engine. We decided to build our manor with modular pieces so creating this block-out helped us to estimate how big the pieces needed to be. It  also helped us to decide on overall size of the level and placement of specific elements. I believe that this was the most important step level design-wise as here we decided what path we wanted the player to walk through. This decision has big impact on playability of our level.

Although, at this step, one of the biggest problems we encountered during the production have occurred. We had pretty hard time trying to match what we had planned in our minds for the interior and for the exterior of the building. The interior simply didn't fit inside the exterior's shell. So we had to rearrange some things. Each one of us drew his idea for how we could fix that. This is my sketch:

After we had whole level planned out we could start working on proper assets to swap with placeholder blocks. At this stage we only had to make sure that the level looked nice as all level-design problems were already sorted. Here's some examples of assets created by me:

And here you can see our level fly-through. It's not completely finished yet, we still need to create some more assets to populate it but I guess it's finished enough to show it. Enjoy :)

Visual composition

Visual composition is the name for numerous operations, actions, and tricks that artists can use to make their work more interesting, more readable, and pleasing to look at. It's the way of placing small elements of the picture so that they look good as a whole. In the previous post I said that you can't create a good image without preparation and it's exactly the same with composition. Actually, it is one of the first things you should do when you're planning a picture. If you don't plan your composition properly there's a huge chance that your picture is going to look random and the viewer is going to have a hard time trying to figure out what is happening on that picture. 

It's quite hard for me to talk about composition without an image example, so I decided to take a picture painted by one of my favourites artists - Feng Zhu - and explain what composition tricks he  used to make it look so good. I'm not saying that I'm a composition expert. In fact, I'm far from being that, so that's only my opinion and interpretation :)

When you look at this picture, there is no doubt about what is its focus point. Your eyes unconsciously wonder towards the golden lion and that is not a coincidence. Feng made that using some composition tricks. First that is most obvious for me is using Fibonacci spiral. It is a composition technique very often used by various artists. It leads the viewer's   sight through the picture in specific way. In this case - towards the lion. 

 

Apart from the spiral, you can notice plenty of other lines that are pointing towards the beast.

Moreover, the lion is the biggest and most detailed figure on this picture, which makes your mind focusing on it. Additionally, his quite dark value contrasts with the light value of the sky creates a tension and makes it more interesting to look at. 

Another important aspect of composition is colour. It's obvious that the key colour of this picture is red. It's the complementary colour of green (which is dominant colour on this image) and it also creates tension, so by placing it on all figures on this picture (beasts and warrior), it makes them feel more important. Also, this choice supports story-telling - you unconsciously know that the warrior and cats are in some way connected. 

All elements that I described above make the right side of the picture more dominant, and Feng made sure that the left side is nicely counterbalanced. He made that by introducing the little waterfall and by giving the warrior a huge sword. Both these things have light value that contrast with the background, so again: tension = point of interest. Also the picture is nicely framed by the fragments of ruins on both sides that keep you focused on the action that is happening between them. 

Obviously, they are just a few artistic decisions that were made by Feng while creating this picture, but I hope that my analysis helped to show the importance of composition in a picture.