After the storm (Post-mortem, piroporopi version)

So! The jam ended yesterday and, despite the current state of the game, a lot of things happened during those 7 days!

The state of the game:

In the game we submitted, on top of a lot of visual and gameplay bugs, last minute changes on the platform's assets messed up the level design and so it’s impossible to go over the first fifth of the level, it’s such a shame!
I feel like it’s not a good representation of all the work we poured into it and the growth we had! So we decided to work a little more on it, maybe a month or so, just to have a product that we can show friends and be happy about. I hope to make some little posts about the progress and archive here the things I test and learn, it is an Unreal Engine learning journey, I hope passing readers will learn a thing or two also!

A word about the team:

The team is composed of Youm and Piroporopi (me writing the post)! It was our first jam together and we roughly separated work like so:

• Youm: Animation, Level Design, Music
• Piroporopi: 3D Modeling, Gameplay Programming, Art direction

But a lot of our theme of work overlapped so it’s not so separated.

Concept:

We had trouble finding an idea.. in the end we took a sheet of paper and did some kind of “Exquisite corpse”: we gave a little piece of idea one after the other to complete a full game concept: 

• Before the storm…  
• there is electricity in the air, so much that we can see it 
• we play as an animal 
• when we touch electricity we switch to another animal 
• and so it changes our capacities
• 3 capacities per animal with different cooldown and they reset when we touch electricity
• platforming on ground debris that are stripped from the earth
• the goal is to go over the storm
• as the storm approaches there is more and more debris
• when we reach the top of the storm cloud we run on the sea of clouds…

It worked quite well so I kind of recommend the method! Plus it’s quick so I suppose you can do it multiple times until you find an idea you like.

Timeline:

My timeline over the course of the Jam:

• Day 1: Concept, 3D modeling and rigging in blender
• Day 2-4: Prototype Character Controller, Capacities, UI
• Day 5: Visual Effects (Niagara)
• Day 6-7: Environment, Debug, more Fx, more UI, more Debug… and end!

The Challenge: Learn Unreal Engine:

We have been working with that engine for a few months but on a topic completely unrelated to game creation (mostly motion capture).

So it was a real challenge to throw ourselves into a jam and make something.

And… I learned so much! From Blueprint Scripting (from using Unreal’s Character Movement premade component to designing my own Components in the most flexible and reusable way), to FX (using Niagara Systems),to warping my head around Unreal’s Material graph and UI design tool, and going headfirst into a lot of time consuming deadends (using Volumetric Clouds, PCG…).

Fixing things!

Here are the subjects I’ll work on and hopefully make a post about how I fixed them (or failed to idk..):

• Making a Storm!
• Pretty and Gameplay-proof Hanging Platforms
• Electricity FX everywhere!
• Cool UI
• The far far away.. Landscapes

That's it for this post, see you for the future updates...