Showing posts with label udk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label udk. Show all posts

Monday, February 11, 2019

Black and white and re(a)d all over: on SOD (1999), Half-Quake (2001), Jeux d'ombres (2007), and NaissanceE (2014)


Last week I finished playing through the entirety of NaissanceE (2014), an avant-garde walking sim / platformer game inspired by brutalist megastructure manga and filled with subtle callbacks to new media art. NaissanceE has a bit of a cult classic reputation among level designers and modders, due to its heavily reliance on abstraction, lack of concrete narrative, and punishing platformer sections.

To this day, the game still defies easy categorization and demographics. Who is this for?

The walking sim aficionado of that time (the Dear Esther remaster was in 2012, Proteus and The Stanley Parable remaster were in 2013) would've hated the platformer sections with instant-death traps, while the action jock might've been tempted to rage-quit with every coy architectural riddle and impossible-to-navigate dark room. Back in 2014, only a few critics dared to defend this design clash.

I think the work still holds up pretty well in 2019, and to understand why, we should take a brief trip back to 1999.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Postcards from Unreal, pt 3: on spaghetti monsters

Unreal Engine 4
We're now a few weeks into the Unreal level design class, and things seem to be going OK. Our students have enough familiarity with Unity that they're able to digest a lot of the 3D workflow without too many problems. People are happily grayboxing here and there, and we recently did an intro to Blueprint scripting.

In the past, I've been pretty skeptical of teaching visual programming methods to students. Teaching a specific visual scripting tool always felt like we were locking students to that toolkit, versus learning how to code in C# or Lua or JS, which is a generalized language useful across multiple engines and multiple industries. Visual programming was considered a relatively niche practice, where you might mock-up an art installation in MaxMSP but not much else, and even Unreal used to confine visual programming to its Kismet level scripting system. (The precursor to Blueprint.)

However, that criticism of visual programming is gradually losing its power as this type of practice becomes more common in the game industry. Many Unreal Engine 4 devs (as well as Epic themselves) make heavy use of Blueprint for making games, a lot of Unity devs rely on the third-party Playmaker plug-in, and even upstart engines like Godot support a visual programming workflow. AAA texture generating darling Substance Designer also has a heavy node-based workflow. It's everywhere!

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Postcards from Unreal, pt 2


My Unreal Tournament 4 deathmatch map "Pilsner" isn't really done. But as an exploratory project, I've fulfilled my goals to learn the basics of building 3D spaces in Unreal. I also reached the point where I needed an actual player base to confirm how the map plays, or at least tell me that it's total shit -- but it looks like I can't even get a denunciation when Unreal Tournament 4 seems to have a grand total of like 5 players!

I appreciate all the pre-configured art content and basic gameplay structures implemented in the game already, and it has been really helpful for me to learn how to configure my assets and work in Unreal projects -- but this experience has also convinced me that I shouldn't try to teach level design to my students with this half-finished basically-dead game.

It was also questionable how well this was going to run on our students' laptops, because half of them use Macbooks with small hard drives, and very little room for a Windows partition and an additional 50 GB for UT4 and the UT4 editor. This leads me to one of the original reasons why we stopped running a level design course: there are simply no popular first person multiplayer games with modern level editor suites that were easily deployable on our students' computers. (Given how long it takes to make games, computer labs are impractical.)

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Postcards from Unreal


I'm building a Unreal Tournament 4 level in preparation for a level design studio class I'm teaching next year. I've been using Unity for a few years and now I feel very comfortable with using Unity for my projects, but I don't really have much experience with Unreal Engine 4. To try to learn how to use it, I thought I'd make a small UT deathmatch map.

Honestly, I think Unreal Tournament is a colossal over-designed mess of a game -- players can slide, wall run, dodge -- use 10 different weapons each with primary and secondary fire modes... I prefer the simplicity (and elegance?) of Quake 3 and its successors. Basically, Quake feels like soccer, while Unreal Tournament feels more like American football with 100 extra rules tacked on.

Nevertheless, it's important to be able to internalize how a game plays, even if you don't like it very much. I've tried to provide opportunities for sliding and wall running, and I've focused on what seems like the core three weapons in UT (Flak, Rocket, Shock) while attempting to channel the UT series' sci-fi urban industrial aesthetic.

Saturday, September 1, 2012

Levels to Look Out For, September 2012

Hey, I just remembered to do these again, so here's some recent work-in-progress environment art / level design deserving of your notice:

Victorian City by Marc Thompson
I always thought art deco was a strange choice for Thief 2 to pull from. Architecturally, they started from medieval and skipped right past baroque, art nouveau, neogothic, and victorian styles, which always seemed ripe for use in a steampunk urban setting. Thief 3 channeled some straight-up gothic as well, which was disappointingly generic. Wouldn't these other, more sculptural styles, show-off your fancy newfangled normal mapping tech better than some boring brick insets? Oh well, here's hoping Thief 4 fares better -- Thompson offers a convincing glimpse of what a next-gen shiny victorian style might look like in a contemporary engine, with some really great use of fog.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Friday, February 3, 2012

Levels that make me want to start using UDK

I still really like Unity, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice, sometimes, to be able to slather post processing on everything without breaking a sweat. Here are two UDK levels that are really awesome looking and don't rely on the default UDK assets, which is so much of the UDK stuff I see out there. (I also wish Dead End Thrills would feature indie work more often, like, 99% of the time.)

Animal Memory (Test 01), by Jack "Gauss" Monahan. Download here. Find all the pink cassette tapes, just like the cool kids in Tony Hawk games. My critique to him -- it's so postmodern cool-looking that I found the level very difficult to navigate. Masterful use of color and silhouettes though, of course. Next build, I believe, Mr. Monahan plans on adding mans to shoot.


Hubris, by Andrew Yoder. Download here. Not much to do here, other than walk around and be freaked out by the ambient sounds. He cites me (oh dear) and Dan Pinchbeck as his inspirations. The models and forms are technically very simple, and sometimes that's more of statement than fancy cubemapped parallax stuff. It's like Ico HD on acid.