Beautiful Corners
POSTED ON October 11,
2024
BY ABNER SALAZAR
In my development, I have reached the point where I am trying to envision what each of my levels are going to look like and how I can tie together some assets to create that vision into something real. During my time at UCSC while learning about game development one of my professors taught us about “Beautiful Corners”. “Beautiful Corners,” are meant to display how synergistic assets can be, what works and what does not. From my story boarding that I drew in my last post, I had an idea of the flow I wanted the game to have. I wanted to start off in a beautiful landscape of plant life, then transition into an indoors space with an almost Eco brutalism feel, from there I wanted to transition into a city, and finally a level high in the sky where any wrong step you could plummet.
In this post I am going to walk through each corner explaining the thought process behind each one and telling a bit of the story that will take place within each level.
Progressive Storytelling Through Environments.
Lock x Jump in my head has always had a story behind it. From initial concept until now, I have kept that story in mind. The first level is supposed to represent a sprouting world, but also an introduction to characters, which is why I decided to make it a forest environment with nature surrounding the player. The player is supposed to feel a bit out of place here. They have technology and guns which contrast the environment completely, but that is intentional as we would come to find out that this is some of the last of what nature we have left in this world that has been taken over by a corporation, Corporation X.
Level / Beautiful Corner 1
Here I am walking through one of my first corners. In this corner the main test was to see how the foliage would interact with the different landmark textures I would apply. This was also my introduction to how landmark and texture painting worked in Unreal Engine 5. I learned so much with this corner, I am glad that I decided to work on this first because it taught me a lot of fundamentals for the next corner.
In this level I hope to introduce a lot of the initial mechanics for the game, and mostly focus on resetting jumps and the different arenas the player will encounter throughout the game. I should also be able to create a lot of beautiful sceneries with plant life and water in the full build of this level.
Image of “Beautiful Corner 1”
Posted by: Abner Salazar, October 11, 2024
Level / Beautiful Corner 2
Here is the walkthrough of my second corner. In this corner I learned a lot about the different lighting techniques in unreal engine and how they work. Since this level mostly takes place indoors I focused a lot on making sure that the player would be able to see important aspects such as platforms. Since this is the first time the player will start seeing what Corporation X has been doing to the world, I wanted to have a more techy feel to things while also showing that as quickly as they can take over, they can abandon. Hence why the plant life has started to take over again.
In this level my goal is to focus more on the dashing mechanics, giving more opportunities for the player to get a higher multiplier count and be able to quickly get some horizontal movement throughout the map. This level in combination with the last should cover the basic forms of movement and allow for the second half of the game to be more difficult and exciting.
Image of “Beautiful Corner 2”
Posted by: Abner Salazar, October 11, 2024
Level / Beautiful Corner 3
Here is the third corner, this level is going to transition us out of the nature environment and more into what happened to the citizens that lived in this place, I am also thinking of messing with more rain effects in this level. What I learned from this level was how puddles and particle effects work in unreal. I tried making some custom solutions to these problems, it was quite a challenge to get the puddles and effects to look just right but I was proud with what I came up with. I want my game to run well across multiple systems so I might use a lot of the effects sparingly, but I loved how a little bit of fog and water could add so much to this corner.
In this level I really want to use everything the player has learned until this point. Dashing and Jumping, i want them to traverse through this environment with high speeds, and I hope to motivate them with a final climb to the top of the Corporation X Tower. This should lead right into the climax of the game which will have the players true potential fully unlocked. I have an idea of how I will represent this by allowing the player to jump and dash an unlimited amount of times to fight to get to the top.
Image of “Beautiful Corner 3”
Posted by: Abner Salazar, October 11, 2024
Level / Beautiful Corner 4
Here is the 4th and final corner. This is the big climax of the game and to show off what the player will be chasing I created the giant container that the player is trying to deactivate. The reason the platforms are so narrow is to encourage aerial movement. This environment is going to take place high in the sky, and the player will have lots of things to dodge and shoot at, while trying to keep themselves in the air. This is one final sprint to the finish line, one final push, and I want to make that apparent. I plan to also have more projectile based enemies so the player has to dodge or even use those projectiles to keep their combo up to make it to the base where they can destroy this source of energy and bring down Corporation X.
On the Next Update…
Next time I plan to show off some of the music I came up for the game, and walk through why I made the choices I did for that so stay tuned! And again thank you for taking the time to read through these updates!