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| The Neppis Project |
Hi all,
So after posting all the projects from my first year. I want to talk to you about my projects from the second year of IGAD. First in line is the Neppis Racing Project from Block A.
At the start of my second year, V2 had just been initialized. Read about that here. Groups of students needed to present project pitches. With a group of students, I wanted to make a short film with Houdini effects. I had grown very fond of Houdini since the Procedural Modeling course in Y1. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of artists to supply the other projects, so we were forced to join a designer - project. A game inspired by a real-life children's game, where the children would build a race track in the sand and on a turn base shoot their car forward with their fingers.
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| Neppis Game src: https://twitter.com/ksyrjanen/status/505296674512965632 |
The Neppis Project
Short Description
- Name: Neppis Dual Racing
- Game Type: Third Person Turn-Based Racing game
- Art Style: Cartoony and playful.
- My role: Technical Artist/ UI Developer
First Technical Artist - Unreal Blueprints
At first, I still wanted to do things in Houdini for the project ( e.g. Make tools ). But since that seemed impossible at the time and our team only had a student license for Houdini, I sought out other means to procedurally model things for the project. This was my first encounter with Unreal Blueprint and Unreal in general. For the team, I created a road generation tool in Blueprints, from a tutorial of Unreal itself.Then UI Developer
As I saw that my options of making tools for the game were limited, I searched for another job in the project that would allow me to do creative work with Unreal Blueprints. That is when I thought of the UI Development. In Unreal I would be able to both design the User Interface and make it myself, using Unreal Blueprints.Being very new to both UI development and Unreal Blueprints I took the following steps:
- First I researched how to build a User Interface in Unreal, with Tutorial videos.
- Then I had conversations with the UI Designer of the team. He wanted to design how the User Interface would look (to a certain level) and function. We had discussions with feedback on numerous occasions, from which he made his Final UI Design Document.
Some Pages out of the Design Document.
Both Hud and Menu mock-ups with some information
On these images he has also used the placeholder art I made, this shows he was also updating the mock-ups while the project was running, updating it with new ideas.
- Lastly, I started prototyping systems, determining the look and feel and creating art.
Creation of the Art and Systems
To create the systems for the menu, I relied on advice from the programmers in the team and my own problem-solving skills. It was mostly a step by step trial and error process.This is a part of my blueprint for the color changing of the cars.
For the Art, I have the document that I made at the time, explaining my work process. The images used below are from that document. At the time it was a really nice designed document and I was really impressed ( if you compare it to the last documents of Y1 it actually is a big improvement), but now I realize everything is so crammed and big. I have come a long way. Though I like the use of color and font weight. It is just the spacing that is really off.
To quickly explain my process I will show you a quick example of the process:
- For a lot of the objects in the game, I would first make placeholder elements.
Placeholder icons I made - Then I looked at the mock-ups that were provided (if there were any) and did research on the look and feel. With the research, I found inspiration and images of what I wanted certain things to look like.
Mock-up of the start screen Research for the logo
Some more research and sketching
- With the research and mock-ups in mind, I started building.
Building the logo
- During several stages, I asked for feedback and I redid some things.
Logo end result Logo feedback
Using the logo in the start-screen several stages
- I used animation to guide the user of the menu.
And that's It :)
I was really proud at the time of my project ( I still am ). It might have been a very simple menu but it was a fairly polished one. I think, looking back at this project and thinking about my other projects that I've done, I should have taken more time to polish the things that I make. Often a second or third revision of a piece already looks a lot better than the first one.
I am also proud of how I tried to guide the user using animation. In my other projects I never really got to that step.
Finally, I am super proud of how I made all of the technical bits. This was my first time working together with programmers and working on a 'sort of' programming task. And even though a lot of the nodes that I made in Blueprint, were far from efficient and Object Oriented, everything still worked.
From this project, I learned that I desired to combine Technical challenges with Creative work and that this was possible in the field of UI.
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