Kick 'em 3D Design.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a game set inside the mind of a Celtic warrior and depicts her struggle with psychosis. As the theme hints, the game is rather dark and filled with Viking style ruins and buildings and depicts many forested areas in keeping with Celtic and Viking tradition. Because we are inside the mind of Senua (the main character) there is a wonderfully crafted and unique setting that shifts and changes as Senua traverses her environment. Elements from her reality and her mind clash as the player progresses giving unique and interesting ways to solve puzzles. The world leans toward a linear approach in its exploration, with the player being able to progress in one direction most of the time. Levels can be confusing at times as there is no minimap or map in general for the player to gain reference, simply the players own sense of direction. This is a great break away from the overreliance on such methods in modern games and I feel that if Ninja Theory had im...

Skyrim. It was a big hit when released and still is today and in my opinion, is well justified in its positive acclamation. Skyrim brought Open World exploration and combat to a whole new level alongside beautifully designed and rendered environments, dungeons and cities where the team has obviously laboured over designing, to deliver a truly wonderful game to play. However, despite this success, there are a few shortcomings. But let’s start with some good. Skyrim sets up and environment that can be fully explored by the player, if you see it, you can likely go there and if not, you can always try ‘Skyrim Jumping’ on horse back. Skyrim Jumping is where the player spams the jump button to find edges of normally non-traversable vertical areas and land on them, getting them a bit further up and eventually, to the top of the area they are trying to climb. This is great for finding shortcuts and travelling faster. It does, however, run the risk of breaking immersion. This risk is ...

This blog post will revolve around using baked lighting in Unreal engine 4 to create an interesting scene from purely grey materials. This exercise was a lot of fun and taught me a lot about how to utilise baked light maps from maya to give more detailed lighting on objects. I also leaned a fair amount about the lighting in Unreal such as using a plane in conjunction with a spotlight to reflect color onto an object from outside the scene. Here are some examples: This is the basic assets with no changes to lighting: This is where the light source has been changed to static. As you can see it gives a much darker appearance: Here I have increased the resolution of the baked light map to make it more detailed so the light can catch on more areas: In this shot I have placed a flat plane outside the widow with a spotlight facing it to reflect back some color and stronger light: And in the final shot I have added some color to the light source, some blue...

My groups current third year project titled Introspect is a boss rush game where the player quickly traverses an environment to fight a very powerful boss and relies heavily on movement mechanics. When starting out, tension is very little as the player exits the starting zone (Lab Area), then climbs as the player has to figure out the movement of our game. Once that has happened the player then finds themselves facing an overwhelmingly large structure inside of which rests the first boss they have to face. This all happens in the space of around 5 – 10 minutes depending on the skill level of the player. Once the fight has begun the tension rises dramatically as the boss is very difficult and the player must utilise all of the learnt mechanics to defeat it. There is a checkpoint before the boss so if the player dies in battle, they can simply respawn at the start of the boss arena and try again without having to traverse the environment again. As in the graph above, the tensi...