Walking Simulators
Creating a walking simulator for my final major project offers many opportunities to develop my narrative and alternative story telling skills. This is an area that i think i have not looked into in much detail in the units so far. Combining this with my knowledge of environment art and level design that i have heavily developed in the units already provides a balances of new content to develop while still working with my strengths.
What Is A Walking Simulator?
Walking Simulators are games with a focuses story telling through observation. They lead the players through a virtual world with little to no game play and instead focus on the themes of the narrative and art to provide entertainment. The genre has grown lots in the last decade with games like fire watch selling 2.5 million copies, and have stood out from the normal fps shooters and game play focused games. There often relaxing yet gripping experiences comes as a breath of fresh air to many players looking for something new.
Often walking simulators lack a lot of aspects modern players have grown to expect such as reputability. Walking simulators are by nature liner and often only tell one story. Players wanting to play the game again are not going to find anything that they didn't the first time. This liner story telling is the biggest strength and weakness of the genre. Having one compact story allows for great and focused development often being the only way for smaller studios to develop strong stories on a budget.
My Walking Simulator
It can be very hard to come up with ideas and over the course i have tried a handful of idea generation methods, mind maps have always worked best for me so i decide to create a mind map to help generate ideas for the design of my game. This leaves it very open for change and it keeps my ideas in one place in case i need to come back and change my ideas in the future.
Looking At Ideas With An Open Mind
My first look at ideas for my FMP is that i want it to be set on an island. I feel this could lead to plenty of interesting story point depending on how much i decide to expand on it. For example something that comes to mind might be a narrative about being washed up onto the island and exploring its secrets. This is a very fundamental idea but it shows just how easily narrative ideas can be created with this location.
For now this is the idea I'm going for but I'm keeping an open mind as its still very early on in the FMP but i want to be time efficient with my decisions as to not get stuck on trivial parts of the project.
looking more into the idea of an island i have refined some more ideas using a second mind map. Deciding on creating a small temperate island as this best balances my opertunity for narrative and story telling while still being a small area that i can keep to high slandered when creating an environment. This idea does have its drawbacks as it limits the player space, so a future issue to consider will be keeping the environment interesting for all of its play time.
ABZÛ
ABZÛ Is a colourful and dynamic world. With no dialogue the game relies on its music and visuals to convey a story and provide great entertainment to anyone willing to try something new. I personally picked up the game risk free when it was released on the epic games store for free in October 2020, I mention this because i understand a lot of people don't want to risk spending its asking price of £15 on a 2-hour long story with very limited game play.
The game guides the players and takes them around to explore the vibrant underwater world of ABZÛ. With its dynamic world system, the player seamlessly triggers events and effect that keep the world interesting but do not take away from the smooth linear story telling. The effect that the player fits in the world seamlessly is built upon from the very start of the game in a more subtle way by having no heads up display as part of the UI. This is a very telling sine of a walking simulator and is common in a lot of other games in the genre.
The life and vibrancies of the world follow the character as they share it through the world, offering a dramatic sense of power to the player. Giving the voiceless character a sense of purpose.
Using simple story telling and visual programming techniques it gets away with having a much more vast and open landscape but keeps the player on the right track and prevents them from getting lost. Contrasting light and dark arears of the world to not only present progression but also lead the narrative of spreading life.
This game is a master class in alternative storytelling, and I have got a lot out of this game. Unlike other walking sims the game does not rely on any horror or dramatic plot lines such as Gone Home or SOMA, both games in the walking simulator genre with large thriller/horror themes. ABZÛ instead relies on the players curiosity to progress the story. Using the natural tension of being under water and in an alien environment to fuel said curiosity.
If i choose to stay with my island idea ABZÛ makes the perfect case study not only can i look into its story telling but i can also look into its technical underbelly. With the game being developed in Unreal Engine 4 the engine i am using for my environment, it also gives me the opertunity to look into how the developers created water and some of there particle effects that i might do something similar to if I have the time. With a lot of public documentation about the game this is deferentially a research avenue i can explore.
SWOT Analysis
I'm writing a SWOT analysis to identify my skill set and opportunities in relation to my FMP. I hope to identify useful points of consideration that i can use when planning what work i will be doing and how i can use it to play into my strengths and avoid my weaknesses.
Strengths
I'm confident in my ability to create and produce assets for 3d environments quickly and effectively while working within the time i plan and organise beforehand. This is evident in my past environment art work from Project_03 where i was able to create multiple assets and finish my project in time before the deadline. I used recourses such as Notion to plan and structure my work so that i could keep myself organised.
I have experiences and skill in generating ideas quickly without letting myself get overwhelmed or distracted. I have constantly explored different idea generation methods in all my past work and don't struggle with coming up with new ideas that can be applied to my work on my project. With technology such as Microsoft whit board to back up this skill when creating mind maps i'm very confident in my ability to apply this in all my work.
I plan to develop theses skills and grow and develop new skill throughout this unit and identifying these skills and bringing them int the project i belie will be the key to personalizing my own work and creating something that shows off my skills and abilities.
Weaknesses
Motivating myself through topics and subjects that do not interest me is definitely a skill i need to greatly develop, when loosing interest in a subject my efficiency falls off and i loose motivation to work through the parts i have no interest in. while i develop this skill I'm working with my other skills to minimize the amount of time i spend being inefficient.
I have confidence in many areas of my work but i understand that i do not know everything. I have a very limited understanding of sound design and Unreal Engine blue prints. This is defiantly something i will work to improve throughout the project.
Opportunities
This project is full of new ideas and subjects i look forward to exploring so i can produce the highest level of quality within the constraints of the project. Looking into water and waves is something i have wanted to do for a while now and this project will provide that opertunity for me to grow my weak understanding of that and many other subjects.
My product itself will hopefully have its own opportunities. Its to early and unfinalized to see if my project will provide aspects that will fill a gap in the market, but i hope to provide anyone who plays my game with an enjoyable walking simulator experiences that is different and unique and not something already available.
Threats
Working in a modern world that realises on infrastructure will never be available at all times. Lots of problems out of my control can effect the world and environment around me. Working in digital media i cannot work without power and outages are a very real possibility.
With the pandemic still very present i can only do so much to protect myself. If i caught coved 19 I would not be able to work in the college and would have to use the more limited recourses that are available for me at home.
Tropical Island
As my game environment will be on a Tropical Island its important i fully understand what a tropical island is so i will be using research to expand my knowledge of this environment so that I have a confident understanding I can work off of when building up my world. This pre-production research is vital for me to be able to build a industry standard world for players to enjoy.
What Does A Tropical Island Look Like?
Geographically all tropical islands share very similar climates, sands, flora and animal life. As they all lie in the tropical band of the equator, represented on the map below as yellow and red colours. Just looking at googles search results for 'tropical island' i have identified common features of a tropical island. White sands, tall palm trees, light blue oceans, and rainforests are all very common features of these islands.
I will be referring back to this research when it come time to build an assets list for my game so that i can accurately depict this environment in 3d for my game. This is important as this environment is a large part of what makes my game unique.
Why A Tropical Island Supports Positive Narrative
With my project I'm trying to contrast the negative trends in media and provide a positive experience to players by placing them in a vibrant and positive environment. To support this i read through a master class article about 'How to Create Atmosphere and Mood in Writing'. In the article it breaks downs '4 Ways to Create a Believable Mood in a Story' The very first point talks about setting and how some settings are predisposed to convey certain moods and atmospheres, this supported my decision to stay with my island idea as i believe it hits this point of having predisposed positive atmosphere with an almost stereotypical accuracy.
With Hawaiian beaches represented in modern media as the perfect holiday getaway but with he pandemic limiting travel people are turning to games. According to the gradian 62% of UK adults played video games over the pandemic. This is a large number of people who are going to be looking for positive experiences and by extension an ordinance of people who might have an interest in my experiences if i stick with the environment.
Water In Games
My island environment will be surrounded by water so I'm looking into water in games in general so that i have the best idea of how i can properly implement it in my environment and simulate water in the stile I'm trying to produce.
A quick google search brought me to a video talking about some of the basic concepts of how water is produced in triple a games. Instead of simulating water all games use illusions and creative applications of different technologies. Such as vertex displacement used to create geometry in a shader. This is done by splitting the information about the vertexes location after it has been passed by the CPU, between being read by the CPU and GPU the vertex is displaced this gives the GPU the displaced value. This method allows for very cheap animation of the geometry that can be used to create the plane that the water material.
How I Will Create Water In My Game
Looking at a video by the Unreal Engine team I learned about one way to create water inside of unreal engine. This method builds off of a system inside in UE4 called 'landscapes' that creates a landscape as a plane that you can deform with the in-engine tools or apply a heightmap. If I was to use this method I could ad the ocean to my landscape and then define a circle around my island landscape using bezier curves to blend the water with my island very seamlessly.
I will still look at other methods as I continue to conduct research but this method looks very promising for islands from what a watched in the showcase below. I did notice tho that the water by default was far too dark and did not have any caustic effects. Caustics are the underwater light reflections coursed by the shape of the surface of the water and how it acts like a lens. This effect is vital when creating clear water and players would know something was missing if I did not have this in my game.
Unreal Engine allows lots of modifications to be made to their water so hopefully it's not to difficult for me to make the water just how i want it to be so it can help lead the positive and cheerful narrative that i hope to achieve.
Foliage
Palm trees are a very high priority asset for my environment as they tell the player a lot about the world they are in. If I can fill my environment with life and bright colors opposed to having a dark and lifeless environment I will be much more successful with filling the games main theme of positivity.
With no understanding of how foliage is made I once again started at the basic and searched up 'how trees are made in video games?' this did not bring as useful of results as when I searched for water, so I refined my search and looked back at the unreal engine documentation about there foliage tool. Looking into this tool from what I have read it doesn't seem like its the best for my project. My environment only requires a small amount of tress so I do not need features in the foliage tool such as creating brushes to paint large amounts of trees onto an environment.
Producing Palm Trees For My Environment
At this point, I still didn't know how to create trees in 3d so I continued to recherche the subject and found out that lots of games use tools to create 3d models of their trees. Such as speed tree and tree it. Both of these tools have strong tools to create trees, tho speed tree has a £19 price tag and tree it is free and seems more reasonable for the scale of my project. These tools allow you to take full creative control over the modeling prose but automates it so that you just have to decide what looks good and what works well until you have the final model you can then import to unreal engine.
As I'm going for the semi-realistic style I want to have some very realistic textures, as I have not learned how to make textures inside any of the units so far I don't want to have to deal with the task of learning from the ground up about how to create textures from scratch. So instead I will be using textures from quixel mega scans and other online texture libraries. This way I can balance the final production quality and work within the time constraints of the FMP.
What Plants Live On Desert Islands?
With the only limiting factor to how much plant life i bring into my island being the time constraints i want to know more about what plants live on and island like this so that i can ad them as potential assets i can do if have the time during the project or if i want to continue the islands development outside of the fmp. As desert island in the small seance I'm thinking of for my project are not common or well documented i will be using information about plant life that grows in the tropics and Caribbean as a guide to find plants that might live in my island.
Going off of the fact that my island is set in the Caribbean plants like ferns and banana plants are both geologically accurate to be found on this island according to a blog post on quora. A banana plant also provides a good narrative point in the fact its a sustainable source of food and can be used to take away the more stressful survival elements of being trapped on a desert island. such as finding food and water.
Lighting
Understanding and creating good lighting can be used not only to create stronger realism but can also be implemented in a way that can guide the player to locations and and items, such as a glowing object in the distance is going to stand out and draw attention to that area.
colour temperature refers to hot and cold light values produced by different light sources and can be used to to carry the atmosphere of an environment. Its measured in kelvin and different values of kevin are commonly used to balance the white values in photography but are sometimes manipulated to change the mood of the environment. 5,500k is the light produced by clear daylight and 2,000k represents the light produced by candle and fire light. For my environment i want to represent light as it is in clear blue sky's but i also want some of that yellow colour associated with a warm environment, so i will probably set my lighting just under 5,500k depending on how it looks inside of unreal. This will hopefully provide my environment with the desired effect and leave the player feeling like they are under direct hot sunlight.
Landscape
Creating a landscape is my highest priority peace of production I have planned so far as I cant construct any of the other parts of my environment without having a solid plane to ad them to. In an unreal engine to be able to use water, you need to be able to use the edit layers function built into their landscape tool to be able to have any water in your environment. So how do I make a landscape? Well, you can generate a flat plane inside unreal engine or you can create a heightmap for it to generate off of. If I decide to do all of it inside of unreal engine I can use the tools inside the engine to paint a landscape in 3d, if I choose to make a heightmap I would use software to manipulate a grayscale image that would hold the height data between 1 and 0 represented as white and black. I have not decided what method I will use when it comes to production but I imagine I will try both.
The Landscape Of A Desert Island
Looking at different images and visualizations of desert islands I have discovered the different similarities between these types of environments. Presenting themselves as flat hills almost floating above the water line almost all desert islands are surrounded in very shallow water that spans a wide area before falling off. This is something I will defiantly try to reproduce in my work so that I can best represent the true feeling of being on a desert island. The landscapes are also a lot bigger than I had thought at first but I have decided I will stay with my small size island for now as a creative choice. I'm doing this not only because of the time limits but also it gives a stronger sense of being alone, if I create a big island the player might spend time looking for NPCs and this would take away from the effect and mood I'm trying to create.
Assets
How much detail is too much detail? Does it take away from the environment? Does it take away from other assets in the environment? Is it going to bring the player's attention towards something important or away from it? These are all questions to consider when creating new assets for an environment according to a presentation I watched by an indie developer live on twitch. When I refer to assets in this project at least I will be referring to all the details in my environment that are not guaranteed to be on a desert island, such as man-made objects like boats or anything that might wash up on an island. I have decided to make this distinction to break up my workflow into more manageable chunks as this will let me organize better when I need to priorates different aspects of the project.
.jpg)
Using Detail To Support World Building
Details that provide no interactivity and don't serve any uses to the player might be considered a waste of development in lots of games as they do not create more gameplay, but often details like this can be used to refer to a much larger story and inform the player about the world they are playing in. The Deceased Soldier at the beginning of super Metroid servers has no purpose in terms of gameplay, tho this small detail tells a story to the player and gets them thinking about what might have happened to him?
Detail like this will be my primary focus when building assets of my environment. Story and narrative are the biggest selling points of a walking simulator. WIth limited mechanics, the charm of playing a walking simulator is reliant on the story and art as its primary source of entertainment. Asset creation should serve both of these points if done well. A message in a bottle seems like the perfect asset to hit both of these points while still meeting the theme of a desert island pretty well.
More water
With the problems that I discovered when testing the unreal engine water addons I decided to look into water as a material. The final product should be same though this method is a lot longer and takes more time to create and modify to the look I want.
more research was needed for this though as it would be using the material editor that I do not have much experience with. I followed a YouTube series that explained how to build the texture as well as how the difference nodes effect the final product and
Environment Art and Narrative
some of the feedback I received regarding my presentation was to look into how environment art as a hole can support narrative. I have touched over this topic in a few different parts of my research so far but I new I still had a lot of work left to do for me to fully understand how environment and story cross over.
I watched a talk about 'The art of environment storytelling' lead by a lead environment artist for naughty dog. In the talk they discus not only what kind of environment they are making but also what state they are creating it in. Is it brand new or is it abended? questions like this should be asked differently depending on the environment and the story an artist is creating. For my island a question i could ask myself is what is the history of the island. Was my island ever populated? If so is there any remaining man made objects left behind? Or if not how can I show that it hasn't been? When working on the practical side of things theses questions will naturally be asked at every step though I think the sooner I ask them the better I will be able to represent the feel I'm going for.
I regret not researching into this sooner so that I could better develop my story in the idea generation part of project and moving forward with other projects I will definitely apply these techniques so that i can create more interesting narratives.
With the narrative I'm tying to support with this environment I'm confident in a lot of the islands history being irrelevant to most of the player experience. I don't think weather or not the player is the first person to ever go on the island or not is that important though it would be interesting story wise if the player found some items that might get them thinking about different possibility.
Rendering
Rendering is the foundation of this field of development and you can clearly see the difference in different rendering formats just by looking at the collection of screenshots above you can see a huge difference between the renders of the barrel I did in Substance painters Iray rendering engine and the real time render that I got from inside of unreal engine 4. The drop in quality comes down to the fact that unreal renders in real time and does not have a ability to render realistic lighting in real time not in unreal engine 4 at least. The quality is still good and in a game environment when ultra realistic quality is not the selling point real time rendering is currently* the best solution to rendering environments for games.