Abandon City
Length: 3 Weeks
Introduction
Level Design and Level Mechanics
Adventure is a project that I made with 4 other level designers. In this we were tasked to create a big seamless level by piecing together our individual projects to create one coherent playthrough. In these screenshots and Development Details, I will be showcasing my portion of the project.
In this level, I drew inspiration from The Last of Us and The Walking Dead to lead my vision and tone. Using assets I found in the Unreal Marketplace, I made a level that not only felt like a real believable place, but I also achieved the feeling of abandonment by turning a once lived in city into an overgrown relic of the past.
Blockmesh (Pre Lighting)
Blockmesh (Post Lighting)
Implemented Cutscene
End Product
Postmortem
What Went Right
Teamwork Experience
I was fortunate enough to work with a great team on this project. I had previously worked with these guys in the last Portfolio class and had formed a friendship with them from there, so getting together again for a project felt like second nature. While we didn't jump into voice chat this time as much as we did previously, we all had an understanding and trust in each other that helped us coordinate. There were plenty of times where there were problems occurred when using Perforce that we all managed to fix together in a short afternoon and get right back to work. This also helped with scheduling and planning when someone would work and when they got off. It was convenient that I worked late nights because of my job so when I worked on the project to optimize it or improve textures and lighting, I wasn't in the way of my teammates.
Industry-style Experience
The biggest takeaway from this is the Industry style work ethic I gained from taking this class and working on this project. For the longest time, I had no idea how teams would share files on the same project without needing a local server to back up their work so entering this class helped me to gain that knowledge into how both remote jobs work and how studios handle and manage such huge teams. I felt I had learned so much from this class both in lectures and projects.
Assets were easy to find
Having used and prototyped my projects in the past, I had gained a library of assets that have accumulated over the past 2 years, a lot of it paid. So going into this class and having that resource usable for me and my team was invaluable as they were of high quality. I was also glad to see my teammates utilize these assets as well.
Learned how to optimize
When making this project, some versions were very unoptimized due to the high-quality assets I imported so I ended up having pop-in issues with textures and an over pool for streaming said textures. I wanted to fix this so I took a whole day to figure out how I could optimize what I had. Looking into my assets I realized that they were streaming both 4k and 8k textures despite them being advertised as low poly/low budget. Knowing this I went and learned how to downscale the textures to 1024. At first, I thought I had to extract the textures manually and edit them in Photoshop, but I learned there was a more streamlined version built into Unreal. Figuring this out was a relief on my shoulders as I had cut out 99% of the work I would have done if I had gone with the first option saving me potentially a few days of work
Work didn't feel like work
One of my biggest concerns when jumping into game development is that it would become stale over time and that it would slowly turn from a hobby into a chore. Previously I had dabbled into game development as a hobby, making mods for games I enjoyed so I never had the experience of creating an actual game or level from scratch. After this class, that feeling of doubt went away as every step I took no matter if it was tackling a huge project-breaking problem or learning something new, I had enjoyed every step of the way. That relief was the biggest relief I have had in a while as I was unsure what I would want to do in life, but after this class, It's clear to me that game development is 100% what I want to do.
What Went Wrong
Perforce Problems
I think this goes without saying but plenty of us had some problems with perforce in the beginning. For me, it was the fact that I had trouble updating my work or uploading it. There were plenty of times when Unreal would crash on me and despite saving beforehand, perforce was having trouble uploading what I had saved because I had "Closed" the program. After plenty of troubleshooting, I had managed to fix the problem and applied it any time this had happened again
Texture Corruption and Pop-ins
This is another perforce problem I had run into but this is more of a file problem than a software problem. When I uploaded my project to Perforce, I wanted to double-check the integrity of the files, so I refreshed and updated my current Unreal with Perforce. Doing this and opening the project, I was met with all of my assets with their textures wiped from the project. I didn't understand what happened at the time as everything was there except for textures. Luckily I had a process for my asset migration where I had saved everything on a separate project so I was able to replace the corrupted textures with the ones from the other project. I was able to get all my textures back because of this and continue my project without issue.
Late nights
When I work on my projects, I like to work on them in the middle of the night because of my job (I don't get out of work until 2-3 am) so when collaborating with my team members there were plenty of days where I had not gotten any sleep as they are working during the day. This put a strain on me but not enough to discourage me from pushing forward. I loved working extremely hard on projects as long as they weren't tedious. This has led to some gaps in communication as I was the lead of the team. In the end, the planning and trust I put into my team had paid off and we were able to produce a product that I am happy to put onto my portfolio.
Conclusion
Overall I learned a lot from this project and how the industry works from the inside. Using this knowledge and experience will help me so much when I jump into the deep end of development.
