Sibling Sabotage Post Mortem

Over the holiday period before Studio 2 began I had set myself the goal of challenging myself. Not that Studio 1 wasn’t challenging enough but I feel like i thrive under pressure and wanted to make a strong impression with my first Studio 2 project. We were tasked with creating a Personal Experience game, I had multiple ideas spring to mind when we were given the brief, like when i was 5 years old my house was broken into 3 times in 3 months and on one occasion i walked in the door to see someone inside my house robbing us. Negative experience after negative experience sprung to mind, it really made me think about my life and why those ideas seemed like good games. To me I felt like it was going to be easier to portray a negative feeling as opposed to a happy one, even though my life has been incredibly joyous. After reflecting and coming up with multiple game ideas I realised all of them related to my family in some way, and as I'm lucky enough to have a fantastic one my game was undoubtedly going to be a positive one. Then I got to the stage of wanting to challenge myself and tasked myself with creating the game which was a memory from my first trip to Disneyland in the Unreal Engine. Not only would I be using an engine I’d never used before but I only had 2 weeks to do it. That was I felt my biggest challenge and that from the get go I was biting off more than i could chew, but of course as things developed that wasn’t even the biggest challenge i came across but more on that later.

Concepting is my absolute favourite aspect of the game design process I get to lay down all the ideas smashing around in my mind and boom out comes a game. However the problem I almost always have is that I have more than one idea that I like and even if I choose the better one i'm left second guessing the project i've chosen. Of course this had to happen again in a two week project. What I finally decided on was a literal recreation of my first moments at Disneyland California when I was 6. There was a massive water fountain you could run in and out of if you timed it correctly and my brother and sister (who I trusted wholeheartedly) told me they would instruct me on when to go in and out. What a foolish child I was. I wanted to make my game portray the lack of control i felt in the moment running into the fountain and also the feeling of betrayal towards my siblings. I had originally planned that you control the child and run around a one way course having to reach checkpoints along the way.

One thing I had always been told was to get functionality first and then jump into assets later. Which if you take one thing away from this, that is the best advice you will ever hear. Of course I didn’t heed that advice and jumped straight into my first ever character modelling in Maya. I was really excited to create a cartoon style character which would add meaning to the game being at Disneyland and giving that childlike wonderment feeling of being in such a magical place. This was when I started realising how hard it was going to be to convey the meaning in my game and immediately stopped modelling and got into Unreal’s blueprint system to get as much functionality in as possible.

When breaking the idea down later through the week I decided that the best possible way to convey the lack of control I felt was by taking the control completely away from the player. I decided to make an endless runner base game mechanic which I was able to do with blueprints, and on top of that create a stop and go mechanic which would be your siblings controlling your movement. When implemented this felt incredibly clunky and upsetting. I loved it.

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To further that childlike feeling I was going for I drew the sibling characters as UI in a disneyesque style, I was super happy with how they turned out and actually saw huge resemblance to my actual siblings. As the end of the project was drawing ever closer I still found myself wanting more functionality that just wasn't there, and in turn made the meaning I was trying to convey so vague and muddied which was incredibly disappointing. This 100% disheartened me and really slowed down my momentum towards the end of the project. There was still so much that I wanted to add, and just not enough time. I had thought so much about challenging myself to create something in Unreal when the real challenge was trying to clearly and concisely convey the message and meaning behind my project.

I ended up really happy with how the game looked, but entirely underwhelmed with how the game portrayed its meaning. I feel like there's many additions I need to add to make that meaning complete, such as having people laughing at the player as you get wet (which happened, i'm not traumatised I swear) and changing the specularity on the models materials each time you get hit to make it look like you are getting wet. The ending of my game is currently incredibly abrupt and i'd love to smooth that out by having a group hug with your siblings at the end so to show that even though it was a strange experience it was still a bonding one.

Although the game didn’t turn out exactly how I imagined i'm incredibly happy that I tried my hand at Unreal Engine because I learnt a huge amount which will benefit me in the future and has spurred me on to create a side project with a fellow developer in the engine. Keep an eye on upcoming blog posts about that project and my second student project coming at the end of this week.