Uncharted Game Scene

 

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Sprint 6

Our project was based on Uncharted 4 A Thief's End, but we also pulled some inspiration from the other Uncharted games. We wanted to do A Thief’s End in Uncharted 4 because of the giant ship in the level that we wanted as our centerpiece. What we went for was a sort of ambiance when traveling through the caves with both of them being a little dark as there are no light sources in them besides the torches in the first tunnel and the flashlight or lantern that you can find outside of the caves. In Uncharted you play as a treasure hunter and so we tried capturing the same feeling that you would get by adding in a rope swing mechanic to challenge the player on whether or not they can even make it to the cave. The story behind our scene was supposed to be a lone treasure hunter that was searching through a small cave and finds a little bit of treasure but then continues to find the real treasure was hidden behind another set of secret doors where they will then find more jewels, gold, coins, as well as a lost pirate ship that is stuck inside the cave on some rocks and is unable to get out. 

Some problems that were happening personally with programming were the pickup script and the rope swing script. The pickup was giving me problems because when applying it to an object that does not have a light source and does not need one it would cause issues in the game that made it, so it was unable to run. Luckily the easy fix I found was just making another script that does the same thing but just doesn't have the light source part associated with the script. The rope swing was giving me problems because if you were to grab it from any direction and started to swing back and forth it would start to add momentum to other directions and we did not want that to happen, so what I ended up doing was freezing it so you couldn't go left or right but then the camera would also start to spin so I had to freeze that as well. Lastly what would happen is the swing and release were way too inconsistent to have in the game so what I did to fix that was added in a landing spot that the player would teleport to once you grab the rope, but the player's body would be invisible and the camera would be locked onto the rope giving the illusion that you are swing on the rope. The downside to this was that it made the letting go of the rope a little weird as you wouldn't see your character jump off and land and you would seem to just appear there.

Lastly, one of the group issues that occurred was that we took a while to finally get into Unity. Since the start of the project around the last two weeks I was the only one in Unity and that's because I was dealing with coding the game and all the interactions, we have in it. The second person only came into Unity with two weeks left because he was implementing the water system for the level but then he left right after that. The main issue was that we were waiting for everything to finish before moving it into Unity, but I told people that it would be easier to start getting the layout of the scene done as soon as possible because the only thing that was left for models and texture were small props.

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Sprint 5

     The first thing that I worked on was getting the UI setup for the scene so that you know what key to press as you move along through the scene. We found this to be important because there are around 4 different keys you need to press not including WASD and space. What I did for that was to have the text pop up when you walk within range of the item instead of having it in the corner of the screen as we thought it would look better that way. After that I found some background music for the scene and implemented it into the scene as. The music chosen was some cave ambient noise to fit the feel of the scene when you walk inside.

     Some of the things I worked on was getting a respawn feature in the scene as a way to make it easier to move around and does not make you restart the whole thing if you fall off because you missed the rope swing part of the map. Even though it is easy to make it past the rope swing part we still felt that there should be some way to respawn if you fail.

    Lastly, I made it so that you use the lever to open both the doors as well as add the audio into the door, so they make some sort of noise when opening. Both open with the lever but one will close when you get too far away while the other will stay open at all times. Both levers do work independently from one another and each door does make a slightly different sound as they are made of different rocks.

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Sprint 4

    What I mainly did this sprint is work on the flashlight and lantern on an and the pickup for the other objects. It was interesting to do it because I have never done something like this before where I am turning on and off the light attached to the object but, I am also grabbing the object's emissive if we decide to use that as another way to show light. The script was also in a way that we didn't need to use either emissive or the light if we didn't want one of them.

    I also added the same pickup and drop to other objects. I did end up needing to make two different scripts for it as if I tried using the one used on the lights for the other objects it would break the game because the other objects did not have a light source attached to them so when you would pick it up the code would freak out. The easiest way that I found to get around it was to have a second script that did not have the light on it and put that on all other objects.

    Every object needed the same thing in order to be picked up and dropped. They all needed to be a child to an empty game object and the empty needed the script while the child would have a rigid body, a collider with trigger on, and they needed a second child object with a sphere or capsule collider for the text UI.

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Sprint 3

    This sprint was a little bit of a bad one because I had some other work that needed to be completed for another class. With that said all I ended up doing was the roof of the cave and within the sides of the roof I ended up making a whole in it if we decided to walk in through the top of the cave then walk down so that it simulates that we are going down into the earth and not just walking from room to room with a cave as the set design.

    I did make a big and a small one while also having two different versions of each, one with a hole in the roof and one without a hole in the roof. I did the two designs because my group was a bit split on what we would do, so I just did both so that we could easily switch to either one later on if we wanted to.

    Also, with each one made there was another made that did not have the door on the side as even though we were deciding of coming in through the top I wanted to have the other ones just in case we changed our minds later so that I do not have to go back and remake them. It did not take me that very long as I just duplicated them before I put the door in and saved the other ones as well.

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Sprint 2

    At the start of the sprint I did the rope swing mechanic which was giving me some trouble so what I ended up doing with it is you never actually see the player launch off the rope onto the ground, instead when you grab the rope the player's body is teleported onto the other platform and only after you let go of the rope does the player's body reappear. I also had to change the way you move on the rope as when you started to only go back and forth you would still end up spinning around and it wouldn't look right when you are looking left and end up jumping off straight.

    The flashlight was also giving me some trouble because I was trying to make it have this bend and it was not coming out how I was wanting it to, but eventually I was able to make it look good enough and settled on the design I had. I also didn't want to go too overboard with the tri-count as I didn't want to have a good chunk of the count be just a flashlight when the big ones should be the chip plus maybe the cannon.

   Lastly, I did a really basic block out of our scene so that as a group we have some sort of understanding of what we are thinking the layout will look like. I didn't make it too complex because none of us really had a vision for what the inside of the caves was going to look like, but we all did like the design that I laid out the block out.

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Sprint 1

    During this sprint, I worked on getting our player controller working. We will need a different one from what is provided, and I did not want to try to change or add anything to the one we were given, as I thought that might be more of a headache. My player controller does not have the stepping simulation that the provided one has, nor does it make any walking sound effects, but it gets the job done and I think I'll comatose less bugs with the rope swing by having my own. Plus, I was able to make it so anyone can change the walk speed, jump height, as well as the camera sensitivity without breaking it.    

    Some of the modeling I got done this sprint was a treasure chest, which took me longer than I care to admit, along with a rope. The chest was giving me some issues at first as I completed it once and then realized that I needed to have it open and when I tried to adjust what I had it caused a whole bunch of issues, so I had to redo the chest. Now it has an inside and we can open it in the scene if we want.

    Finally, I also made a rope that will be used for the player to grab onto and swing across gaps in the land giving us an interaction with the scene that we think would be cool. I did make the rope small because from what I was seeing is that the smaller it is the more rope like it will look in Unity as it needs to have many duplicates as well as multiple anchor points.