Recently joined Project Runway, as an independent contractor. The project is hosted by Full Sail University and they link up with graduates to offer experience while creating content for their summer outreach program for the youth. During the two month contract I will be personally working on different projects with this one being the first.
This is a 3D platformer project that has requirement of having both a third person camera and a camera situated to the right or left of the player. I created a player character and coded the movement with instant editable variables for jump, and camera location. I then created a volume that can be placed in the world to switch perspectives from third to right or vice versa.
Other mechanics/systems I have included so far are a player HUD that displays the player's health and gems. There are health pickups and damage pickups with adjustable values for the amount of damage they do or the amount of health they give. There are gems that can be picked up along the level. Since this is a platformer I went ahead and created some spike traps to add some more variations to how the player can be damaged.
There are two types of spike traps I made, the first being one that activates when the player overlaps with the collision volume. However, there is short delay that allows the play to safely travers across the trap as long as the player continues to move forward. The other spike trap is an automatic spike trap, this trap continuously moves up in down with a short pause after the timeline completes. The players will have to time their paths to avoid taking damage. To add variation to the auto trap, I created an array that can hold different timeline tracks so some can move faster or slower or have different sequences added.
The project is still being worked on for a few more days and I plan to add two levels and a few more mechanics. Once added I will update this page with the info.
Here is the finish product created after two weeks. During this project I completed all the tasks required of me, which included mechanics and systems. I had extra time and so I add extra mechanics and created two levels though I did not get a chance to add audio which I regret.
Some of the extra mechanics I created consist of spike traps both automatic and pressure traps. I also made moving platforms that can be customized in the editor to not only go back in forth but up and down and even in a loop.
I also added in heart system on top of the health bar that was required now, when the player dies they lose a heart and because I also created checkpoints the player spawns back at the last checkpoint instead of the starting position when they die as long as they have at least one heart.
Creating the checkpoint required me to also create a simple save system which was fun and a great learning experience. When the player overlaps with the check point flag a animation occurs that shrinks the flag. On top of that the location of the flag is saved and the amount of gems the player has is saved as well.
Here is the first mechanic for the puzzle project for Project Runway. I created a sliding door that requires a key code to be entered into a keypad. I really wanted a keypad to show up for the player so one of the first things I did was to create a UI widget that was added to viewport for the player to interact with. I also felt that there was a need for more user feedback for if the correct password was input or not and so I added a camera to the BP and made the player's camera transition between theirs and the bp's camera on each input.
There can be multiple of these doors throughout a level or game thanks to open variable for the keypad that can be customized for each door added to the game.
Here are some of the user feedback sound effects I added to improve the player experience.
After working on the three types of mechanics (key pad doors, batter doors and elevators) I went ahead in designing the prototype level to demonstrate them all in use. I decided to go with a broken spaceship design since it fit the style of doors and elevators I created. I used some pre-made props along with some 3d modeled props I made myself to fill out the space and bring the idea to life. I added a tracked quest and some UI for the batteries to help the play keep track of what had been collected and what they needed to do in this level.
This level was fun to make and though it worked fine while I was making it I realized there were some bugs when recording and when trying to build the demo. One of the issues revolve around the camera that focuses on the doors when you interact with them. If I had more time on this project that would have been the first objective I would have tackled since outside of that the majority of what I was aiming for had been successful.
I most enjoyed figuring out how to make the elevator doors open and close like a real elevator along with adding the sound effect to bring it alive.
This was the finale project I worked on and it was the one that gave me the most issues. I had to create mechancis and NPCs that allowed the player to play in a tradional stealth game fashion. With the ability to sneak around unseen, stealthy elimantae targets and be spotted and attack by patroling NPCs.
I was able to get most of the mechanins working but possibly because I was using code from multiple sources in the development there may have been some overlapping code or just broken code that caused issues.
Some of the issues I ran into..
These were the major bugs I ran into and because of that I ran out of time and was not able to complete a detailed level like I had with the other two projects.
However, this project taught me a lot about Ai and and how their brains work and made me intrigued to delve deeper into the different ways to create Ai in games.
Unfortunately, after turning in the project I somehow corrupted the files on my computer and lost the project and so I do not have a video demo of the work I had implemented.
Here is an overview of what I implented and did in this project.
