Hi
I’m part of a two-man dev team currently working on a first person adventure game in Unreal 4, with free tools only - Blender and GIMP.
[video]https://youtu.be/FRGj8nOgs0w[/video]
Our game’s core idea is inspired by the movies Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow. The game features a time loop, in which the player lives through the same day over and over. The visual style is 80’s sci-fi, hard edges, dark environment.
The player wakes up as a passenger of a small transport ship. The other passengers are dead, there is an unknown creatue loose in the ship’s interior. The other survivor is a weird, mysterious person who monitors the events through cameras, and helps the player through graffiti.
The ship’s whole system is in the player’s control from the point he wakes up. He can shut down the heating, the turbines, the water supply, air circulation, cut off the electricity or mess with the fuses and cause a fire. He can combine items, get access to new routes inside the ship, and find different ways to get the ship out of the time loop.
All the rooms inside the ship can change from day to day, based on the player’s actions during the previous day. The other survivor remembers what the player did and tries to recreate it before the player wakes up. He doesn’t have much time before he has to shut himself in, so the recreations are hasty and imperfect, but help the player nonetheless. There are multiple solutions to the puzzles, so it depends on the player what the ship’s fate will be.
Because of these unique game mechanics, we have created blueprint-based rooms that can change during runtime. We have first built the level from Unreal 4’s BSPs, then exported them and edited them in Blender. We’ve divided the one big mesh into several meshes for each room that are changeable and can be manipulated during run-time. At first, we wanted the walls to be detailed meshes, but the textures baked from those meshes proved to be a lot more efficient. We’ve baked the displacement, normal and ambient occlusion maps in Blender, and then created metallic, specular and roughness maps by hand in GIMP.
We have uploaded a simplified version of the in-game map to Sketchfab, you can see it here:
Solving puzzles is made difficult by the wandering monster. The monster can’t really be killed, but it can be mislead to do things that are useful to the player: opening doors, breaking furniture etc. The player can use sound and various objects to achieve this.
The story can be discovered by reading the ship’s logs left by nine characters (four passengers and the crew). All of them have different reasons for being on the ship. Depending on how much the player knows, he may react differently to certain situations.
Releasing the game is still going to take some time, but to create a truly enjoyable experience, we’re going to need lots of feedback.
If you’re interested in the project, you can read about the development and more here:
We’ve recently started our Greenlight campaign, please, take a look!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=664966365
Thank you for reading through this wall of text, we’d be thankful if you gave us some feedback!