Wrapping things up

So, the deadline is almost upon us.
The last few weeks have been a challenge to find solutions where needed, to complete what needed completion and refine everything at the best of our possibilities. We had some hiccups, among which the decision of two of us to abandon the project.
But even if with some difficulties, we are almost ready.

After having refined the logical basics of the narrative branching system, we needed to find a way to actually represent it in the game. Since none of us are really proficient at animating, and that modelling characters that then would have needed proper animation would have been a poor use of our time, we enacted an option we had outlined at the beginning of the project in case we would have proven unable to actually animate 3D characters to “play the scenes”: a 2D semi-still cutscene system.

The characters talking will appear on the screen, with their lines on the bottom part of it. The player will skip the lines by clicking the left button of the mouse.
I am personally happy of the final outcome of this system, which allows us to showcase the beautiful drawings of Arthur Rackham, a recurrent artist in the official competition’s assets pack with an exquisite and unique style.

We also implemented some aid for the player to understand the commands of the game, and to introduce them to some poems from The Book of Fairy Poetry (readable here), an amazing illustrated book of the beginning of the 20th century containing beautiful poems about fairies and amazing pictures by an incredibly talented artist called Warwick Goble. We had the chance to see an original first edition of this book, now more than 100 years old, when we visited the British Library in London earlier this year. I hope you will all have the chance to have a look at it at the Shakespeare exhibition. If not, ask the library to look at it during your next visit there, it’s really worth it.

Finally, even if we didn’t publish updates regarding the rest of the game, especially its looks, it doesn’t absolutely mean there haven’t been any. Just check it out!

Aesthetic Progression of Game

Concept Art by Jac Rossiter

Our game has gone through multiple different ideas on the approach of the art aesthetic, early on we were aiming for the most realistic style possible but we felt that going for that style was not going to seperate us from the other teams. From there on, so many ideas became reality.

First Test Idea

Our first idea entitled the use of bold colours to create an interesting abstract world, the method behind it was that the based on distance that the player is away from the trees, the colour of the trees would represent that. This lead to the result of a very abstract world but possibly too colourful and we wanted it to suit night time more.

Second Test Idea

Although this method follows the same technology as the first one, this idea was to try and recreate a paint style aesthetic so we went for more pale colours as we felt that it would also be far more fitting in a night time light setup.

Third design idea

This was basically our final idea, we realised that the technology behind the trees was far too buggy to be practical and we were falling behind in time significantly constantly experimenting. Due to this, we went back to a realistic style design and decided on letting the lighting bring out the fantasy in the asset.

Final, in-game asset style

For this section, I made use of the post processing tool in unreal to mess around with the bloom, contrast and lighting in general to try and recreate a fantasty style atmosphere. I felt that using the bloom brought out a good bit of focal point on the olive trees while making all the other trees feel natural. Although there was no practical use towards that, I felt it worked and made the forest not feel so generic. Making use of the hue options provided in unreal, I changed the lighting to a more greeny approach to bring out the nature feeling.