Week 4.06 Reflection — Reading Week

Thank goodness for reading week!

This was a welcome intermission in the main thrust of course material that was very much needed. It was far from a break though with some intense, focused effort being brought to bear on both the game development and the marketing plan.

Game Development Updates

Much of my attention this week centered around procedural environment generation . As I’m conscious that time is rapidly running out, I elected for just an internal environment for the proof of concept and have modelled a modular block that can be used as both a corridor and a room. With the Blueprint ‘code’ in place to generate rooms and corridors on the fly this will greatly ease the level design task ahead of me. All I need to do now is add the code to populate the rooms once generated.

One concern I do have is how heavy this will be when running native on the headset. It will add more time but I’m seriously considering converting the Blueprints into C++. I’d rather spend CPU cycles on player experience than procedural generation and if I can reduce the processor load by moving to C++ that will be a win. If I choose to go this route, it will be much later in the project.

One idea I did have (and put to good use) was to create a sandpit project based on Unreal’s First-Person template. This allowed me to develop the procedural generation functionality away from the headset. Without the need to keep putting it on and taking it off, I found I could work much faster.

Another big win was to rapidly improve my modelling skills in Blender. I did this by following a time-lapse video tutorial on YouTube and playing it back at 25% speed. By frequently stopping and rewinding I found I could easily follow the steps of a Blender expert to create something similar. Personally, I feel I learned much more from this approach rather than being spoon-fed each step without really thinking what I was doing. The only concern I have is the complexity of the model. With the beveled edges and the pipes I used to add details, it may be too heavy to render in-game.

Marketing Plan

The biggest win this week was significant progress with the marketing plan. This was the culmination of my study and research activities over the last few weeks. I also invested some time in creating a template for the business and marketing plan documents to give a consistent look and feel to the assignment artefacts. At the time of writing, my business plan is really just a list of headings as I’ve mostly been concentrating my efforts on the marketing side.

Conclusion

At the mid-point of the module, I’m back on track again having caught up on both the study material and the project work. I’ve also made significant progress on the first assignment, and, if my understanding of the assignment brief is correct, we have now covered most of the study material. If this is indeed correct, I plan to submit ahead of the deadline to maximise my time on the second assignment as this carries the bulk of the marks.

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash