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.