First House Finished...

...well the basic structure is now done. In this post I will show you each floor of the house so you can see how everything came together. I've used different colours for each room so I can easily identify them.

So here is the finished house complete with roof. It took me countless hours considering I hadn't created something like this before. There is a total of 358 kit pieces used.

You can see the balconies better in this image than the other one.










The Ground Floor

The ground floor includes a game room, bathroom, closet, theatre, kitchen, pantry, mech room, living room, elevator space, pool and garage.

The ground floor uses 162 kit pieces in total.








The First Floor

The first floor includes the master suite complete with en suite walk in closet and a balcony, an inside balcony over viewing the theatre, a second bedroom with en suite and balcony, laundry room, third bedroom with en suite, linen closet, library, elevator space and a fourth bedroom above the garage with en suite and walk in closet.

The first floor uses 196 kit pieces in total.




I found the plans for a similar house that I used as a guideline to ensure things were the correct proportion. Then I mixed it up with my own ideas. I'm pretty happy with the finished product and I'm sure the next house will take less than half the time this one took.

Thanks for reading. I'll be posting again soon.

The Finished Kit

There ended up being 39 kit pieces. It definitely sounds like a lot but they all serve a purpose and helped me to create my first house and will help to create every other building in the game. I will show you all of them giving a brief explanation of what they are.

The Wall Pieces

In this image we have from the left: - 

• Average corner wall with floor 
• Average wall with floor 
• Average floor 
• Average wall with 30 cm floor extrusion 
• Average wall with 30 cm floor extrusion and 10 cm wall extrusion (to compensate for wall thickness)
• Wall 190 cm (for short doorways)
• Average wall with 10 cm extrusion
• Lastly just an average wall

An average wall dimension is 10 cm thickness, 300 cm height and 200 cm width, all other average walls are based on this with extra extrusions.

The Doorway Pieces

• Garage Doorway
• Corner Right Doorway
• Corner 2 Doorways
• Corner Left Doorway
• External Double Doorway with Floor
• External Single Doorway with Floor
• Internal Single Doorway with Floor
• Internal Double Doorway with Floor
• Short Internal Single Doorway with Floor

The Fillers and Pillars

• Average Small Floor Filler
• Pillar 10 cm with Floor
• Pillar 10 cm
• Pillar 10 cm with 30 cm Extrusion
• Pillar 20 cm
• Pillar 20 cm with 30 cm Extrusion

The Roof and Pool Pieces

• Roof with 10 cm Extrusion (Same as average floor size just with the extra 10 cm) 
• Roof with 10 cm Extrusion on 2 sides
• Pool Wall Floor (200 cm high)
• Pool Wall (200 cm high)

The Staircases

• Average Staircase
• Spiral Staircase

These may be too specific to use in other houses but I hope I'll be able to use them throughout the game and maybe add some more variations to the kit. The staircases were definitely the most challenging kit piece to work on as there were so many measurements to take into consideration.

The Thin Wall Pieces

• Thin Corner Wall Floor
• Thin Floor
• Thin Wall Floor
• Thin Wall with 30 cm Extrusion
• Thin Wall Average Floor
• Thin Wall

These thin walls are 100 cm in width but have the same height as an average wall.

The Window Pieces

• Large Wide Window
• Large Single Window
• Small Single Window
• Small Double Window

Thank you for reading. The next post will show the finished house using this kit.

House Modelling: Problems Solved

After having a go at creating the first house with the 16 kit pieces I realised very quickly that I need a few more pieces, for example a thin wall piece that has a connected floor of 200 cm, a few door corners and a second wall piece with an extra 10 cm extrusion (wall thickness) so it will fit flush in the corners. An example is shown below: -

Before                                                                                             

After

This worked really well but once I started to work on the interior I realised the 10 cm wall thickness messed around with how everything came together particularly with doorways. Here is an example of the issue: -

The circles show you breaks in the wall and the squares show that the walls are lined up at the edges where there should be a break, for an intersecting wall. 

This is because the doorways facing left are using up extra space with their wall thickness. 

It’s even more problematic considering I need to add another wall between the light pink doorway and the edge of the yellow floor to create a closet space, which would make everything another 10 cm out.

One way of fixing this is to have an internal doorway piece that incorporates the 10 cm wall thickness within the 2m floor. Another way would be to rearrange the current pieces so the doorways face forward but I don’t want to mess with my plan or restrict the directions in which I can place pieces in the kit.

I decided to create an internal doorway piece that has an overall length of 200 cm as oppose to 210 cm as well as keeping the longer one for other areas. 

Here is how it all worked out : - 

You can see I also added an extra floor piece to make the bathroom bigger. Overall I achieved what I wanted to with the shorter doorways.

There were many problems I had to work around but the last problem I wanted to talk about is floor gaps. Here are some images so you can see what I mean: -

Before

After

Everything else is in line but there was an annoying gap. In the end I had to create a small floor filler of 10 cm to fill in any floor gaps.

That's all for now. I'll be posting again soon with another house modelling update.

Modelling The First House

Overall I tried out 3 different methods of creating the basic structure of the first house to find the best way that would also work efficiently within the Unreal Game Engine.

Method 1

The first method I tried was simple box modelling, where the whole house was one element. I found this to be rather time consuming especially when trying to connect 2 separate walls (using the weld vertices tool) whilst trying to keep the measurements exact. I wanted to try a method that was quicker but maintained accuracy.

Method 2

The second method was using splines; this was less time consuming and ended up with a decent basic shape rather quickly. I realised that problems had occurred when certain vertices hadn’t matched up very cleanly, meaning I had a lot of polygons with too many lines and vertices that stretched over the element.

Method 3

The next idea I want to try is creating each room as a separate element, I’m hoping this will mean my laptop will be able to keep up a bit easier and allow me to hide rooms when focusing on one specifically.

I read a lot of articles about modular building, power of 2 and how it works well in UDK and how to efficiently create buildings for the Unreal Game Engine. 

One really good article (http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html) by Joel Burgess shows how modelling a kit streamlines the process. 

I also found this article (http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/ue4/ue4-guide-to-scale-dimensions.php) really helpful; showing how you can change the snapping feature (it doesn't need to be a power of 2) in Unreal to suit the pieces you want to create among lots of other helpful points. I really wish I had known that I could change the snapping feature when I was working on my previous games as I encountered a lot of problems with gaps and Z-fighting causing horrible glitches in game.

In conclusion from the research I have done I think the best way to create the house in my game efficiently in both 3ds Max and Unreal is to use well measured kit pieces, an example of this is shown below.

This image is from the article by Joel Burgess. By keeping widths, heights and lengths of walls, doorways and spaces the same throughout I will be able to mix and match each piece to suit the overall structure I am building. 

In the end this will create a good base for each house then detailing such as pipework, wall plants, lights and other decorative meshes can be added in to add interest and avoid repetitive looking structures. 

My first worry using this method was that each house will have an array of different window types like full length, alcove and small ones (e.g. for bathrooms). Along with different shapes and sizes of windows each would correspond with the different styles of the house from ultra-modern to older styles. A way to combat this issue is to create a few different wall segments with ‘window holes’ that vary in size and shape. Then when I am modelling the different style windows for each house ensure that the frame is the exact measurements to fit.

Here is a link to the dimensions I will be working with - The Dimensions.

I will post updates on the house model along with the complete kit list soon. 
That's all for now.

My Plans

Hi guys...

I’m sure you’re interested to know some more about this game. I have put a brief outline of my plans below.

What is it?

So, I am planning to create an action game in a small community called Honeycomb Valley. The valley will include 10 - 20 large houses which the player will be able to enter. There will also be forests in the surrounding areas with cabins randomly dotted around for more areas to explore. 
I want to cater for as many weapon preferences and fighting styles as possible so there will be an array of guns, melee and throwable weapons for the player to find. There will be a lot of enemies to fight all over the map. 
I am currently working on a good storyline as I believe this is important for the overall experience of the game. I will go into more detail on this in a later post. 
As I mentioned in my previous post I have created a survey for gamers to express their opinions regarding their in game preferences. Once I have enough responses I will use this information to make more concrete decisions within my game.

Why?

I am creating this game because I believe my previous attempt doesn’t show my full potential. I love games and I want to make one that I am 100% happy with. 
I am deliberately including certain aspects in the game that can be shown separately in a portfolio for example each of the houses can be shown individually with a walkthrough video. 
Even though I am more confident with my abilities now than before my last game I still need to hone my skills, making this game the perfect independent project. 
My goal in life is to work at a game company so I am hoping this project will help me to achieve that goal.

How long? 

I have from the 1st of February 2017 to the 28th February 2018. 

Obviously you can tell I have started a bit early but most of the work I have done over the last few months have been planning and familiarising myself with the programs again. 

The first week of February will be ‘crunch’ time where the amount of hours I spend on the game will be stricter; I will spend 8 hours a day, 3 days a week on the game. There will be times when I have extra shifts at my part time job but I will compensate for this by making up the 8 hours elsewhere like splitting it across a few evenings.

The image below shows a Gantt chart of my plans.

The dates on the chart are guidelines I will be working with. I know there will be unforeseen problems that I will have to adapt to so the Gannt chart will be changing slightly throughout the project to accommodate this. Each task you see on the chart is a general term that encompasses many smaller tasks, which will be broken down to form daily goals.

What software?

The main programs I plan to use are Autodesk 3DS Max, the Unreal Game Engine, Autodesk Mudbox, Blender, Autodesk AutoCAD and Adobe Photoshop.

What hardware?

I am currently working on my laptop and will be until the end of February. At the end of January I will have saved up enough money to buy a custom computer, this will take around 4 weeks to arrive. The custom computer will have high enough specifications for me to run the Unreal Game Engine more efficiently. Lastly a Wacom graphic tablet for 2D drawings.

That’s all for now, I’ll be back soon.

Welcome to my blog

I am creating a second game, hopefully bigger and better than the first.

Here is a 10,000 word report in pdf format I wrote about my first game - The Report

Here is a video walk through of the game - The Walk Through. 
(Lower the volume if you are wearing headphones as certain sounds are rather loud) 
I recorded it on the ice cream screen recording app so it did pick up noises that weren't in the game and due to my laptop being about 3 years old the quality of video isn't great but you'll get the general idea. 

I created this game for my final year project at university, there were plenty of programs I needed to use that I either wasn't 100% confident with or had never used before so it definitely was a challenge. I also had to juggle my other university modules so the time I had to make the game was limited. 

I now would like to attempt a second game where I have more experience and time to complete it. Along with creating my second game I will be holding down a part time job so I will be spending a minimum of 24 hours or 3 days a week on the game from February 2017. I am hoping to have the game completed by February 2018 but as this deadline is my own personal aim it can be extended if anything unforeseen happens.

I have put a survey online for gamers to answer so I can find out about their preferences in weaponry, fighting styles, enemies, scenery and others.

The survey is here if you'd like to check it out - The Survey

I’ll be back soon x