Garden World
SOFTWARE USED
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Unreal Engine 4
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3DS Max
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Maya
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Make Human
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Mudbox
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Marvellous Designer
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Quixel Suite
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Photoshop
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Mixamo (Website)
Garden World was my second year project where I aimed to create a Tomb Raider style game mainly focusing on the parkour mechanics. The original idea was to create a Japanese style peace garden with a rockery waterfall, sand garden, lush forest, totems, a pagoda and a large dragon fly statue. The garden housed a magical item that when the player collected it, it shrank them down to the size of an mouse leaving them confused and alone in the giant would that once was small, trying to search for a way to return to normal.
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At the beginning of the game players would watch a trailer about the back story of the character before entering the garden through the main gates. The player first experienced the garden in its normal size seeing a cat walking around, the water flowing peacefully and the occasional dragonfly buzzing past. Then after they are turned small they experience chaos the cat now chases and hunts the player, the peaceful water now a gushing stream and the dragonflies seeming huge and threatening. This was all written in a narrative document I created to accompany this game in its development and this can be found in the Games Design Document at the end of this page.
Above you can see some images from the white box I created utilising Unreal Engine 4 and its basic shapes, this was key step in the development of this game and set the foundations for the game to be created on. At this stage the project was still more of an idea, I wanted to create a Japanese peace garden but I was not sure on exactly how the story for the game would go and how it would impact the world, which at this stage was really important to my design. After fully completing the white box I realised that the scale was much bigger compared to the character then I intended but it looked interesting to see the world from the view of a smaller creature, which is when I fully developed the story for the game and built things into the level with the purpose of expanding the story such as the dragon fly statue. Throughout development I wanted to create a scene which when the player was large they could find things in the environment that gave hits to the true nature of the garden, such as small foot prints in the sand garden and I wanted players to experience things like the rockery water fall and the cat when it was calm first and then chaos when there small. I also was planning to put in a consequences system so for example if when you meet the cat you stroke it and are friendly then it will be nice to you when you turn small, but if you are rude and chase the cat then it would hunt the player instead.
I created all the models using 3DS Max at a base level and Maya for some things like utilising its transfer maps feature to generate normal map data for the rocks. All texturing was done inside Quixel suite utilising painting on dynamasks to create custom textures where necessary and sometimes creating texture variants for each model. I also created a character for another one of my modules that I used for this project. This character was created using a base mesh created in Make Human which was then exported to 3DS Max for some small adjustments before I put it into Marvellous Designer and created an outfit for her which I then put back into 3DS Max for more adjustments. This character was also fully animated using pre-built animations and rigging system inside Mixamo and then placing into Unreal Engine 4 and this also included a climbing animation that was utilised as a mechanic in game.
During designing the white box for this game I learned how to use the landscaping tool. I used this tool to raise and lower the terrain to not only create hills and dips in the landscape, but I also utilised different shaped brushes to make the main grounds for the garden uneven and look more natural. I also used this tool to carve out the streams and the large pond in the middle of the garden. Next I created a dynamic material that I utilised on the ground to paint different textures on and off the floor creating dirty areas around places that would be most used and gravel areas around the rocks and pond bed. This gave well needed structure and realism to the level and made it look like it was in an actual environment rather then just models sitting on a plane.
I also utilised the foliage brushes and applied custom made models to them such as the rocks and grass I created. I then painted theses into specific areas to fill the environment like under the water and around the main rock path and filled the environment with grass at various sizes to bring live to the scene as well. Both these tools were really enjoyable to use and I would like to utilise them in future outdoor or relevant projects.
I handed in this project with a working mechanic and the start of a level but I really want to take it further and see what I can create. This story was so enjoyable to write and the plans I had to make this game a beautiful and intense play experience have not been lost. I will continue this project once I have finished university mainly to see how I've improved but also because it was really fun.
When I started this project I wanted to be a Level Designer, which is why I put a lot of effort in carefully designing the level seen above going from drawings of a level to full white box ready for asset implementation. But it was during the story development side and the designing of other aspects such as controls, mechanics, art style, user-interface, genre, and base environment design that I realised that I loved designing games at a core level.
During development of this game I also had to create a Games Design Document (GDD) that went though all my intentions and design decisions that I made before creating the game and was updated and adjusted during development. I enjoyed writing this document so much that it aided greatly in my decision to become a Game Designer and stood as proof that I could achieve great results on things I felt so passionate about! I have put a link to the GDD below for any who wish to read it!