Game Gen - Week 56

Story Writing and Lore Building

This week, I focused a lot on furthering the lore of my horror game and giving the players a secondary objective that would encourage them to explore more around my maps. I decided to create a system I'm calling the Notebook. 

The Note Collection System

The notebook is a UI interface that the player can open and view notes they have collected from around the maps. These notes are left behind by four characters who were previous visitors to the mysterious realm the players find themselves. As the game continues, the players can find more notes from the four characters, eventually leading to an incident report-type document that uncovers more of the sinister nature of the realm they currently inhabit. 

The Notes (Actor that the players find around the map) and Notebook both utilize string tables which I've created for each character's story. This is an easy way to pre-plan lots of text for different uses and dynamically pull the relevant text based on keys of the String Table you want. It also allows for much easier localization of your game into other languages down the line if you choose to. 

Non-Euclidean Portals

I wanted to create more dream-like mechanics that incorporate the feelings of things not matching the physics we expect in everyday life, so I've been working on a non-euclidean portal system. The portal is basically a doorway that looks like it's just in the middle of a space or on a wall where the players can confirm nothing is behind it, but when looking at the doorway from the front, you will see into another level. This gives a really trippy feeling of physics not abiding to what we expect in the real world and provides a sense of mystical strangeness as well. I have some bugs that are affecting the portal traveling properly right now, but I've included a clip of what the portal looks like. 

Steam Multiplayer Integration

Thanks to Vives' diligent research, we were actually able to almost fully hook up the Steam multiplayer system using the Advanced Sessions System plug-in. This provides a much easier interface between Unreal and the Steam online systems and we were able to see the game in development mode connected to my Steam account! I'm looking forward to getting this fully set up so we can do a playtest on the level and mechanics I have so far, especially in regards to ensuring replication will work properly. 

Furthering my Unreal Technical Knowledge

Other than those systems in my Horror game, I've been researching more in-depth on the various plugins and capabilities of Unreal Engine. 

These include: 

- Learning the unreal plugin for Motion Matching. 

- Learning more about Procedural Generation. 

- Learning about World Partitioning to optimize large maps. 

- Learning more about the Water system for Unreal. 

- Understanding more efficient ways to control data sets, like String Tables, Data Tables, etc. 

Here's a brief video of some of the things I've worked on the last two weeks:

(Canva was down, so I'll have to upload my video when that is available again)

Temporary Video:

Next Two Week Goals

- Finish getting Steam multiplayer set up and do a small playtest (nothing official, just testing replication)

- Continue learning more of the technicals of Unreal to better utilize all the available features. 

- Work on the next level block out for the Horror game.

- Continue fixing the Portal system. 

- Work on medal detector interactable/usable item. 

Here's one of the Incident Reports I made for one of the character storylines the players can uncover.