Sidescroller Project Post-Mortem

This project was the first one to be undertaken by the entire yeargroup, although we were split into sub-teams to work on different levels. We were tasked with creating a side-scrolling platformer in Unreal Engine 4 with four levels and various characters, and we had six weeks to complete it in.

• What I Worked On

I worked as an environment artist for the “scary” level, alongside two other environment artists and a concept artist.

I ended up making two statues, three pieces of foliage, spiky crystals, doors for the end of the level, some chains with lamps, cave paintings, and a waterfall. I also made a piece of collapsed wall, but I did not include this in personal asset screenshots since the tileable textures were made by another group member.

The statues I made were sculpted in Zbrush, retopologised in 3D Coat and baked down in 3DS Max, whereas for the door I made the base mesh first, sculpted, and baked it back down. I found for the rest of the assets I made I didn't need to sculpt anything, though I did bake down the grass planes from an initial model I made in Max. All assets used Albedo, Roughness and/or Normal maps where needed to work with Unreal Engine 4’s Physically Based Rendering, often with extra Alphas to mask out glow as a dark atmosphere was an important aspect of our level.

• What Worked Well

For the most part people had their specific areas of design to work on- One member working on rocks and architecture, one primarily focusing on the important hero assets and one (me) working on smaller hero assets and miscellaneous objects to populate the scene. This ensured a consistent look between similar kinds of asset.

• What Didn't Work Well

For our level there was definitely a lack of communication between the engine artists and the rest of us. On our side I don’t think most of us were that great at either getting assets to them soon enough or not telling them they were done and on drive. Obviously I can’t say much about the engine artists’ experience but they made some questionable design decisions (such as colouring some of the waterfalls bright blue) and ignored my very small list of tweaks to be made. This is understandable since I made said notes only a day before hand in but most of the issues I brought up could easily be fixed in seconds.

What we should’ve done is borrow the engine off the engine artists occasionally to make tweaks ourselves. One of us tried to do this once but didn't give notice and so some work had to be scrapped, as the engine artist had still been working on the most recent version. Again solely a communication problem.

• Problems I Faced, and How I Overcame Them

It was very difficult in the earlier stages of the project before the modelling stage. I didn't feel very confident with my concepting skills especially next to the dedicated concept artist. Even during the whiteboxing stage I felt quite useless as I intended to sculpt my most important assets from scratch and so spending a lot of time on whiteboxes wasn't an efficient use of time for me.

I pushed ahead with modelling what I could as early as possible to make myself useful as early as possible. I also tried to focus on the more complicated assets first to get them out of the way so I would be able to focus on smaller assets to populate the scene near the end. This worked out very well for me as I was able to ask the rest of my group what needed doing and take on extra assets to push things towards completion.

• What would I do differently if given a second shot?

If I were to undertake a project similar to this one I would ensure that there was a concrete system for communication between the environment and engine artists, with specific pieces of information that must be passed between people so assets could be imported correctly and as soon as possible. I would also either push for the level to have more man-made architecture or experiment with vertex painting in-engine, as the way it is now the level is 90% generic rocks.

• Conclusion

I’m happy to have been a part of this project, not because of the end result but because I gained a lot of experience as well as some work for my portfolio. Most levels turned out very well but I admit the one I was a part of feels lacking. A lot of this blog entry probably comes off as complaining about other people’s work but I really do think everyone in the project did the best they could, and considering how pessimistic people were about the project around the midway mark I know things could’ve gone much worse. This has all been a very important learning experience and great practice for working in a multifaceted development team.