Games Scripting 2 - Space Station Training Camp Assignment

For this assignment I was required to form into a group consisting of two members, build up a training tutorial style level for a First Person Shooting game in space using the Unreal Engine and add in certain requirements to fulfil the given brief. As explained on the hand-out, we were to produce a 'marine training camp' style scenario with an opening cinematic, briefing cinematic, target range tutorial gameplay and finally finish with a de-briefing cut scene to round the stage off. Many other necessities were required, such as several scripts for the targets and triggers, a power core at the end shootable by the player, visio and story board planning diagrams, voice acting with subtitles and more.

Before starting with the assignment, me and fellow team member Lewis decided to sit down and plan how we want to produce the level. We assigned each other roles, having me build the majority of the training camp area and add in the cameras, while Lewis scripted the targets, NPC bots and added in an introduction movie at the start using space shuttle movers. Our planning was very effective, as we both had core roles to perform on the assignment over the Christmas period which unfortunately fell in the middle of the work time.

While building the level, I used techniques already learnt from previous assignments and from the 'Mastering Unreal Technology' book which served as tutorials on how to perform certain tasks in the editor. I kept in mind the space theme of the assignment, producing a space station styled training course, filling it with static meshes from the mesh browser were I saw appropriate. Also when creating the level, I added in doors and an elevator using the 'mover' option. This allowed me to key frame in animations, of which could be triggered by adding in the appropriate trigger and configuring it to work with the mover.

When recording in the level, I added in scenes using the Scene Manager and used various techniques such as both Linear and Bezier lines for paths, camera pauses and camera fades to help keep the cut scenes in the tutorial entertaining and pleasant to watch. A problem I faced when inputting cameras was some appeared to duplicate on top of each other, causing error messages when building the level. I fixed this easily however, simply by deleting the extra cameras that appeared leaving us with one.

Lewis did an excellent job of inputting the script into the level, the majority of which he input into the level himself over the two weeks holiday. With Lewis' scripts, our level was able to have players shoot good guy and bad guy targets, destroy the core at the end of the stage, spawn explosions once targets were hit, give players a score and rank at the end of the stage and have two NPC characters move around in cut scenes. A big problem we encountered during the scripting stage however was implementing the voice overs and sound effects. Neither of us could figure out how this was inputted into the editor, with the Mastering Unreal Technology book serving no help either. With time short, we left this part out and worked on tweaking the rest of the tutorial.

During the assignment, I felt I had many strengths and weaknesses. My main strengths were building the level and inputting cameras. I enjoy both these aspects of level design, while in turn having the scripting as my weaknesses. Luckily, Lewis felt that he was much better at the scripting than the matinee sequences, therefore we assigned each other the roles we were both strongest at. Unfortunately however, one of the 'scenes' in the matinee was removed by mistake during the final work on the assignment, with us loosing the pan through of the level. We had to promptly replace this however, creating a shorter and more to the point version using the time we had as wisely as possible.

Overall, I feel the assignment went very well. Most of the requirements were met by hand-in day, with the exception of voice acting and sub titles, both of which neither of us had any idea how to do. If I were to do this assignment again I would defiantly spend more time adding more length on the cut scenes, having more NPC characters in and an entire fleet of ships for the opening movie scene. I would also spend more time planning things out on paper, as our diagrams were quire basic. The reason for this however was that we felt discussing what and how we should do things during the creation process of the level was much more effective for our way of working rather than simply working from a sheet of paper.

Games Scripting 2 - Overgrown City Assignment

For this assignment I was told to create an 'overgrown city' style environment in the Unreal Editor, use the matinee tool to film trailer Esq camera sequences and script bot AI, enabling them to walk around the map and interact with each other. I was told at the beginning of the assignment to use 'I Am Legend' as inspiration for the environment, with a desolate looking city scape for characters to move around in. The idea of this assignment was to use the tools at hand, create my own 'First Person Shooter' style PC game and pitch it in the form of a short movie.

At the beginning of the assignment I decided not to attempt at creating something out of my reach, only having two weeks to finish the task, not knowing much about scripting within Unreal and having many other assignments in parallel to this one. Using skills previously learnt in the last assignment, I decided to create my level and camera paths first before moving on to the area I was most reluctant about, the AI Scripting. Before creating my level however, I decided to plan out the map on paper, outlining were I wished to take my scene and how to build the stage.


I tried hard to add detail to my level, attempting to make it as professional looking as possible. As an example, I gave certain lights a different 'tint' of colour, which helped make my level seem more realistic. By adding a light and changing the 'LightColour' properties, I edited certain lights to have a blue tint helping areas of my level seem colder, while one or two lights placed behind fire emitters had red tints, making that area of the level seem much warmer than the rest. Fire emitters and Spark emitters are also present, helping make my environment more interesting.

I used the fire emitters by placing them on the map from the 'Actor Browser', editing the settings to add in how much smoke particles I wished to rise from the flames, etc. The fire and spark emitters helped give my city an overall 'run down' feel, with some objects in the stage broken, such as street lights and cars. To give my level an 'overgrown' look, I added in certain textures from 'Arboa Architecture' and 'Humanoid Architecture' giving buildings vine covered walls and placing static meshes, such as grass, around the environment were I saw fit. I wanted to give my level a dark and eerie feel, and I felt I did this well by using the lighting to my advantage and adding a spooky sounding audio track.


Whilst filming in my level, I decided to try and use as many dynamic, professional looking camera shots as I could. I did this by varying my shots, having low, high, panning shots and so forth. I also made sure to include Bezier Curve paths for cameras to move around, allowing me to curve the camera as it moved around the environment. To focus on actors running around my environment I assigned cameras the 'Look At Actor' sub action. This focused all of their attention on the character moving around the screen.

At the end of the filming I also added in a overlay effect for my credits, of which I saved a custom texture as a .TGA file in Photoshop and added a 'Camera Effect' as a sub action to the final camera of the footage. Overall, I very much enjoyed adding cameras in to my level, having a good variety of different shots making use of 'Look at Interlope', 'Look at Actors' and 'Fade In, Fade Out' sub actions to name a few. The problem however, is I felt I focused too much time with my camera work than performing scripting for my AI.


When performing my scripting, I came across a large amount of problems. Many times, I would end up confused over a problem within my script, only to find the issue was with something that didn't make sense. For example, when allowing my AI to fire, I had to implement 'Shoot Target' then 'Wait for Animend' and finally 'Shoot Target' again rather than 'Stop Shooting', a command that has been given to us to use by both the Unreal Editor book and previously used Tutorials. This caused hours of problems, with my AI bots not stopping shooting, despite me using the 'Stop Shooting' command.

I now feel that in my level I should have implemented many more bots, however not having previously touched the editor before, let alone scripting within it, I wished to play it safe, creating something I felt that I could still achieve. Unfortunately, compared to many other students footage in class I felt that mine proved extremely lacking, despite it taking hours to only get two AI bots moving. I felt that, if I would have had more experience using scripting inside the editor before I could have used my time on this assignment much more wisely, and improved my overall product, which I felt was disappointing. However, despite this I made sure to include everything asked in the assignment brief, with scripted AI Bots moving around and interacting with each other in my overgrown city environment.

I did encounter some issues however, such as characters walking through floors, which I now know was caused by re-sizing the AI characters height and widths. Another problem I had was the 'taunt' actions. My AI Script was programmed for characters to taunt, however when the footage was played in the level they would do nothing but stand in a static position. I could not find a reason for why this was happening, and still do not know as of now.

Overall, I wasn't as satisfied with my finished product as I had hoped to be. I felt that the main problem with my piece was the fact I concentrated more on camera work than scripting itself, and that I struggled in getting AI to work. I think my level itself could have been larger, however I decided to not spend so much time working on the creation of the environment and use the most part on scripting the AI, which was good as the scripting gave me the most problems.

If I were to do the assignment again, I would now be much more confident in adding more NPC characters than in my final piece. I now know the basics in how to script and a good deal of problems that occur and how to overcome them, such as the 'Shoot at Target' command issues. I felt my trailer was taken down the wrong direction, not having much action included at all when compared to other students animations shown in class.

Games Scripting 2 - Museum Level Assignment.

For this assignment we were asked to learn the Unreal Editor tool set, produce an interesting level based around the concept of a museum and record 2:30 minutes of professional cinematic footage using the Matinee tool in the duration of a week. It was difficult getting a copy of the program and install it alone- however learning the tools and becoming savvy with the different options in the editor was made much easier as we could refer to the 'Mastering of Unreal Technology' book purchased online. I had to prioritise my work, spending as much time as possible working on the level while at the same time completing several other assignments for different subjects.

I tried to keep my level simple, while at the same time still covering all the parts of the assignment brief. Not having used the Unreal Editor before, the majority of time working on the assignment was getting used to the program rather than concentrating on level concepts, narrative in the film and so forth. It was a challenge, although after four or five days I finally managed to create a convincing museum with objects inside to focus on during the camera footage.

To fill up my level with these objects I made use of the Static Mesh browser. The reason I used Static Meshes rather than importing my own custom models was to save time, only having a week to complete the task and learn the software at hand. Inserting the Static Meshes was a quick and easy process, moulding the size and alignments using the scale and rotate tools. I also added an audio track to my Museum level, 'Mall 3' taken from the 'Dead Rising Official Soundtrack.' I chose this music as it felt most like 'browsing' music to me out of all the tracks I have on my hard drive. Seeing as though my Museum was Egyptian themed however, maybe more Egyptian style music should have been in order.

When adding in cameras and recording the cinematic footage in my level I used a variety of different camera techniques to try and keep the 2:30 minutes interesting. For the camera paths, Bevel was used with a couple of places to give the camera more movement than simply travelling in a straight line. I also made sure to have the addition of fade-outs and camera shakes, the fade-outs making my footage jump from camera to camera more smoothly and the shakes added in when a camera fell from a large height. I added both to try and give the footage more variety than simply switching from camera to camera and moving down a straight path, looking at Target Actors.

I felt presenting the map in front of the group went as well as it could have. There were no technical problems (except of my pen drive catching a virus from the terminal, though luckily that did not effect my level files) and the audio track I added alongside my level played at a suitable volume. At the end of the presentation, Brian and the group gave constructive criticism that will help when working on future projects.

If I were to do the assignment again I'd make sure to try and spend time getting used to the tool set beforehand giving me more time to work on the level and recording itself when hit with the deadline. Camera paths in the recording were not as smooth as could've been and after seeing other peoples work in the group I could've approached the brief much more creatively integrating a unique idea in to the given assignment.

As a whole, the assignment was fun to work with, although extremely tedious at times and being difficult to get used to the program at the beginning. Now, being used to the Unreal Tool Set and receiving feedback from the group, I can hopefully increase the quality standard of my work in assignments to come.

Games Scripting 2 - Machinima Presentation Overview

After completing our Machinima Presentations in front of the group I was generally pleased with how we all worked. All four of the group members contributed with the final presentation and all the work was present on the day of the presentation.

Upon getting given the brief we all went away and researched in to the Machinima subject, coming back next lesson prepared for discussion on what we wanted to address in the presentation. After brainstorming some ideas we came up with four major sections - 'What is Machinima?' ' How is Machinima Produced?' 'Advertising using Machinima' and 'The future of Machinima.' We split the work on four sections between us all and added it to the final presentation that Sunday. We all worked excellently as a team and were prepared for presenting a couple of days before the deadline. All the members worked efficiently and contributed around the same amount as all other members.

When it came to presenting we unfortunately had a technical difficulty when playing one of the videos. The link was broken, as overnight the video itself had been removed from the Internet. I tried to push on with the presentation however and managed to explain what happened in the video without the need of any visuals. There was a lack of confidence in one of the other members of the group, but the same could be said for me as currently I'm still not as confident as I can be when presenting. I can overcome this by having more practice with presenting and generally having more confidence in speaking about my/our work in front of others.

If we were to do the task again I would've spent more time talking about our primary example in the presentation, 'The Strangerhood' and also made sure to arrive early at the lesson and make sure all the videos would play with no problems beforehand.

Games Scripting 2 - Researching Machinima.

What is Machinima? -

The use of Video Games or other interactive CGI running in real time to produce cinematics such as short movies or advertisements. Machinima can be possible using any form of interactive media such as games, with the use of Computers to record and edit video and sound.

Notable games that are often used to produce Machinima are:
Quake

Halo Trilogy
Grand Theft Auto
The Sims
World of Warcraft
Garry's Mod (Half Life)

The first ever piece of Machinima produced was 'Diary of a Camper' made using ID Software's 'Quake' on PC. The film ran just under two minutes length and spawned off several other movies with other users taking on board their own ideas making other short films.

Machinima Today -

Machinima has become popular among gamers today with regular videos uploaded on to YouTube and a whole dedicated .com domain site registered for the subject. There's even a 'Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences' website set up explaining what Machinima is and why/how it is used.

One of the most famous Machinima's ever produced is 'Red VS Blue.' Red VS Blue is produced using the 'Halo' series of games created by Bungie Software and has even gone as far as to release on DVD format and even have an Anime cartoon in the works.

Notable Links -

Antics 3D - Non-game software that is used to produce virtual movies.
The Stranger Hood - Machinima used as advertising.
Matinee - Machinima editing software that came with Unreal 2003.

Molotov Alva - Machinima documentary set in Second Life.
Mackies 08 - Machinima Film Festival.

Images -