Type: Solo
Project Length: 3 Months
Skills:
Tools:
What was the goal?
This was a project for a game asset class. It was a more introductory course, so a lot of time was spent getting to know software, especially Unreal. In class, we had modelled textured barrels to get familiar with the modelling pipeline, before importing them into Unreal. The goal for the final product of this project was to have these barrels interacting with another model we create, turning it into a game.
What was the output?
As a part of the class, we had our barrels in the Unreal scene and had set up a simple UI to cause the barrels to spawn in, swap textures, and explode. For my game, I thought it would be really silly to use the barrels in a pinball machine, where the game would track how long the barrel is moving for.
In Maya, I modelled a machine, as well as some flippers that would animate flicking up. I added pegs as well separately, so that I could make their and the flippers have a much bouncier physics reaction in order to send the barrel flying in the machine. Additionally, I had a simple pane for the machine’s glass, that I would later texture to be transparent to allow the player to see the barrels without them flying out of the machine. After texturing was done, I simply imported my new models into the engine and set them up.
I hooked up the animations of the flippers to buttons so that the player could flick the barrel, and to ensure that the barrel wouldn’t get stuck in place, I had the game count down the time of how long the barrel is moving by looking at its speed, ensuring that a player couldn’t break the game by getting the barrel stuck in place. The UI would also track the player’s record time, giving them some kind of goal to reach. The player would still be able to switch the textures of the barrel with other buttons, and I reutilized the exploding to be how the player resets the game instead!
Takeaways
This was a very silly project, and it was a great learning experience too! I think the game I programmed took what was expected of us and ran with it. I’m rather proud of how well the physics worked together, and I had a lot of fun making the new models and texturing them. The output was much more detailed than the professor was expecting and impressed a lot of my peers!
