FalconGames

Practice project completion

Between my last post and this one, I’ve made a lot of progress. I’ve modeled a number of different assets big and small, created and applied textures, added sound effects, worked on level design, and done a detail pass. I’ve also implemented an objective system in the form of collectables, modeled, rigged and animated an enemy, and added a shader that pixelates the view for a more ps1 style look.

One of the most time-consuming parts of this process was modeling and texturing. My process for this was exporting the blockout from Godot and importing it into blender. From there, I isolated each asset and recreated the mesh to match my intended look while maintaining the correct proportions. Since I was aiming for a low-resolution PS1-style aesthetic, my texturing process followed a specific approach:
* source a standard picture or texture
* Cropped it to a 1:1 ratio, focusing on the relevant texture details.
* Scaled it down to roughly half its original size.
* Offset the height and width by half and edited the seams to ensure seamless tiling.
* Scaled it down again to 32×32 pixels with no interpolation to enhance pixel contrast.
Once the texture was finalized, I applied it to the model and made UV adjustments as needed to ensure a clean and consistent look.

With the assets ready, I began importing them into the project and turning them into scenes (Godot’s term for a prefab object) to make small adjustments to them such as size, coloring, adding hitboxes or other components, such as a light cone beaming down from the bulb of a street lamp or a warm glow with a random sin wave flicker to the animated flame textures that come from a candle or campfire. After implementing the blockout components, I returned to Blender to create additional ‘prop’ assets like trash bags, empty bottles, crates, barrels, and other environmental details to make the environment feel more immersive.

This project has taught me a lot, one of the biggest lessons being how even a small test project can quickly grow into something much larger than expected. Because of this, organization and naming conventions are extremely important for keeping everything manageable. Expanding on that, having a clear from the start, defining where the project begins and ends,helps maintain motivation and direction. Without this, it’s easy to keep adding things aimlessly until it “feels finished”. This might seem like an obvious statement now, but the impact of structured planning is much greater than I initially expected.
As well as project management, I’ve strengthened a broad range of game development skills, including programming game systems, like a player controller and interactive objects. I’ve worked on level design, making a level that is coherent and isn’t confusing to navigate. The project also required a lot of modeling, covering not just asset creation but also UV editing, texturing, rigging, and animation.

Wrapping up this practice project, my next goal is to learn Unreal Engine. Since it’s more of an industry standard, It will help improve my employ-ability and help guide me toward the role and industry I’m aiming for. Another big reason for this switch is the huge volume of educational resources freely available for self teaching and referring to is much more abundant since Unreal has been around longer and has a larger user base, making it an excellent platform
Making some models

My inspiration for this first game came from the love of the ‘Haunted PS1’ genre which as it sounds, is horror games in the style of old PS1 games. The reason for this is that whilst I find them enjoyable and nostalgic, they also seem like a great start to learning game dev as I don’t need to spend an immense amount of time in order to make perfect models that won’t look out of place.

In this recent update, there were a few scripts of code that I went back and tidied up now that I have a bit more experience with good practices, some of this includes making sure that each ‘scene’ that uses scripts, operates off of a base script so that other components don’t have to ‘reach into’ the object and find the script when they need to call or operate on something. I also added a door that activates when all the correct candles are activated, now that the foundation is there, I plan to turn this into a small puzzle when it comes time to flesh out this scene.

The main chunk of time for this progress update comes from making some models. Now that I have quite a few of the core elements, I want to model the intro area and the graveyard and start bringing things together somewhat. The following gif is of some vines that act as a door once the player has entered the main area of the game which becomes obvious after a sound queue plays.

The next group of images are a collection of some more models that I have been working on which in all fit with the low poly look of modern game systems that I am going for. The texturing is done by taking an image of the type of material I want such as wood planks or leaves, scaling it down into a very low pixel count then blending the edges. The next lot of work I need to do will be more modelling and texturing for the first area.
Small more technical additions

In this post I have been focusing on additions that are more code related and not quite as visual or flashy. A lot of these are small but I have finally added enough that I feel happy to show off and talk about.

Firstly, I have added a basic foundation for pickups that can interact and change stats on the player. This means that future pickups can use the foundation and many variants can be created with far less effort, with only changed stats and model.

Next is another foundation for future work which took a while to implement, however the time taken will be well worth the ease of replication for multiple future NPC’s. I haven’t added the option to respond with dialogue options however the NPC has states with the ability to change between states easily. The dialogue box is set up to be dynamic to fit in any amount of text.

The following addition is less practical and useful for the future, however it is flashy to a degree especially with the added sounds, giving the player a sense of reward and accomplishment when they find these collectables, which are the main progression point in this short game. They are created off of a base collectable that spawns an amount of particle emitter scenes that are sent off in random directions. These particle emitters move outwards, then after a second or so, travel quickly towards the player and are freed when they hit.

The last addition that I want to talk about here is the ladder, a very simple idea however I have found that in many games they do not feel good to use, so I have gone about fixing what I don’t like about them and implemented a version that is intuitive and smooth to use. the ladder needs to find the player in the scene and modify their movement options so it also requires tweaking the player code as well. The movement is based off of mouse placement and an offset ‘deadzone’ so that entering and exiting aligns more with player intention.

One of the biggest challenges so far is scope and the player controller scaling in size. I have found that the more I add, the more the player controller is required to handle, so to solve this and prevent messiness, I have continuously gone back and refactored for simplicity and added comments for context in order to keep things as clean as possible. Another way to help with this, is to handle as many things as possible from scripts outside of the player, such as on the object being picked up, most of the work will be done on that object and only interact with the stats of the player, and by doing this, makes things much more manageable and easier to tweak and fine tune in the future.
Safe Zone , Light & Fog

Continuing my development journey on this project, I have been making small bits and pieces that wouldn’t necessarily be enough to talk about on their own, however some related pieces have come together than I am happy with the look of, even if the models are just placeholders for now until the block out is complete.

After completing the block out for a graveyard, and doing some more research on level design, I found that ‘Safe Zones’ that can give the player some breathing room can add to the tension outside the safe zone by contrast.

I want this short game to have a foggy and eerie atmosphere so I played around and learnt about some of the worldspace effects and added some fog, we don’t want to add too much so that vision is hard and we don’t want too little so that it’s not effective. Adding a safe zone, I don’t want those parts to have an eerie feel to them, I want the player to have some breathing room, where perhaps they can save and regain some resources and know that they will be fine. To achieve this feeling, I wanted to get rid of the fog yet still make it feel like there is danger outside of the campfires safety, so when entering a safe zone, the fire springs to life with a “whoosh” and flickering visuals, the fog begins to dissipate and a shrouded veil surrounds the campsite which also doubles as stopping the player from seeing too much when the fog clears.

This effect was made through some signals that are sent when the player enters a hitbox and modifying variables through code, making the veil appear, removing world fog, turning on a campfire with its own code to make it flicker and feel alive. The effects are reversed when the hitbox is left and the campsite falls dead.

The Player also has a way to deal with the darkness in classic fashion with the use of a flashlight which incorporates a barely visible yellow cone to emulate the effect of a visible beam. I will talk about this item and the way its movement is achieved more when I discuss the Player Scene.
Level Design
The Block out

Level design is one of the challenges that I had thought of before and not paid any great attention to, thinking that when I get to that point I’ll be fine, just make a cool, fun and interesting level right? I’ve played plenty of games in my lifetime and I know what makes a good level!

Today I began on the block out of a game I’m making to improve my skills and hopefully share. To kick this off I made some basic roads and alleyways before I started to look at some learning material on level design only to realize that I had fallen into the Dunning-Kruger effect, now knowing that there is so much more that goes into level design. Falling into this common effect is discouraging, but understanding that skills can and will improve with dedication is what makes it possible to push through. Time to start the studying again.

The Basics:
- Guiding the player towards clear objectives
- providing interesting challenges that fit in with progression
- Providing a coherent and fitting thematic environment/story
- Have a clear and noticeable sense of progress
- Introduce game mechanics and iterate upon them
From the above, I have already started to form in my mind what I want to try and do for the level I’m working on. First off, I want to make it clear at the start what the player is working towards: six collectibles that need to be found in order to beat the game. These collectables will be found in an open area with clear set pieces for the player to explore with the harder challenges being further from the starting zone which will play into the sense of progression and the challenges will each have unique game play mechanics.

Since this project is intended as a learning piece for me, I don’t want to spend too much time making the perfect level with perfect balance, but I would like this to be something I’m proud of showing so I don’t want to rush this and I think the 6 unique zones will be a great way to show off and practice my skills as I want them to be quite unique from one another. I am only just starting this journey, and I am sure I will run into many challenges along the way. Documenting them and detailing how I overcame them will be an invaluable learning experience.

Above I have begun to block out some level ideas and start implementing a small puzzle for the first sequence. When it comes time to model, I plan to export to blender and make some models to replace the placeholders.