Stone Circle Scene Progress - February 27th

I've made a bit of progress on my new 3D environment project today. Having completed a basic level layout last week, I have now translated the layout into a terrain for the level, added some textures and put some trees down. I've also started playing with lighting by adding torches, setting the scene to night time and adjusting the fog. I think that this is a decent start.

At the moment all of the models are works-in-progress (the torch, for instance, is just a cylinder with a point light and particle emitter), and the materials are all just taken from the starter content, but this has helped me to visualise the scene and will allow me to move forward from this point to adding my own assets.

My next step will probably be to create my own tileable textures for the terrain, and maybe do some basic models for the three trees that will feature in the level's gameplay. Watch this space for updates!

Ilkley Moor Research Trip

So last week, I was not required to attend uni due to a Berlin trip taking place that many of the students and staff of the Design school attended, so we had a bit of an unofficial reading week, and we were encouraged to go on some trips to aid our research. (This also meant I wasn't able to do a Spontaneous Sunday this week as I was too busy, but it will return next week!).

As my new 3D environment project focuses on stone circles, I decided to take this as an opportunity to go and see one with my own eyes, and I set to work researching stone circles that I could visit. I soon discovered that a stone circle called the Twelve Apostles exists on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. This is not far from my girlfriend, Chloe's, hometown, which was handy because it meant we could go and visit her family during the free week and also go and see the stone circle. It all worked out very well!

I printed out a route and some maps that we could follow to reach the Twelve Apostles stone circle ,and Chloe and I got the train to Yorkshire on Wednesday. We went on our trip to Ilkley on Saturday.

Here's some info about the Twelve Apostles stone circle:

"The Twelve Apostles is a stone circle near Ilkley and Burley in Wharfedale in West Yorkshire, England. The Twelve Apostles consists of the remains of a stone circle with a diameter of about 15 metres. The circle originally had between 16 and 20 stones, but it is now reduced to 12 stones. The stones are made from the local millstone grit. All of the stones were fallen by the mid-20th-century and were lying loose upon the ground. At the centre of the circle was a small mound, which may have been the disturbed remains of a burial cairn.

In 1971 a group of amateurs made an unauthorised attempt to re-erect the fallen stones, but the stones soon fell again. The stones have since been re-erected.It is not clear who re-erected them, nor when. The site suffers severe visitor erosion, as it was formerly hidden beneath heather, but is now in an area of bare trampled soil. It is regarded as one of the most damaged prehistoric sites in West Yorkshire."

- Wikipedia entry on the Twelve Apostles

Before getting the train to Ilkley.

We approached the Moor from the North, from the centre of Ilkley where the train station is located. Our walk would take us up the northern approach, past the White Wells cafe located on the ascent, and up some stone steps before reaching the top of the ascent and the Moor proper. We would then walk south across the Moor to the stone circle. We saw lots of interest stuff along the way including Victorian graffiti carved into rocks, cairns, streams, and some nice views of the Yorkshire countryside and towns such as Ilkley and Bradford.

White Wells cafe on the ascent to the Moor.

Victorian Graffiti

After about two hours of walking, we arrived at the stone circle itself. It lies about 380 metres above sea level, and its location offered amazing views. We had been able to see very far for pretty much all of the walk, but the views from the circle itself seemed to be the most impressive of them all. The location also felt like the spot that was most exposed to the elements. It was very windy and it began to hail soon after we arrived at the stones.

Twelve Apostles is not the most impressive stone circle that one can visit, and it has been heavily affected by human activity and interference, but it was still very cool to see a real example of what I had been researching for the past two weeks. I took a moment to take in the sights and try and place myself in the viewpoint of the ancient people who will had placed the stones there. This experience will hopefully help me to pinpoint the feeling that I want to evoke from the atmosphere of my 3D environment.

Making our way back down to Ilkley...

Our trip to Ilkley Moor to see the Twelve Apostles stone circles was a really fun and insightful experience. I think that seeing a stone circle in person, and the pictures that I took, will help me with my environment art project.

There's a load more pictures of our trip over on Imgur, check them out by clicking here!

Stone Circles & Druids - Starting Work On My Next Environment...

The 2nd Semester of my MA Games Design course is now well under-way, and while I have been keeping myself busy so far with learning to use the UE4 sequencer, dabbling with character modelling, and learning to use UE4 blueprints, its now time to get to work on my main body of work for the semester!

My next project will, of course, be another 3D environment. Over the last week or so, I have conducted extensive idea generation, gathered research materials and visual references and drawn up some sketches for my next environment.

Sticking with my historical themed environments, I wanted to do something involving stone circles and prehistoric megaliths from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. This is an area of history that I've never looked into before and I've never looked this far back in time - I soon realised that concrete facts are very hard to come by and a lot of the history of this period is based upon theories.

I began to look into the uses of stone circles with the aim of making a scene involving Celtic Druids, and discovered that stone circles and megaliths actually predate the arrival of Druids to the British Isles by several hundred years. Luckily there is evidence that Druids used them for rituals, even if they did not build them themselves. This also allows me to take a bit of artistic license, so I may add some sort of mythical/fantasy angle.

I have eventually decided to create a scene set in a forest in Iron Age Britain (approx. 800 BC to 43 BC), with the player taking on the role of a Celtic Druid who must gather a branch from 3 different symbolic trees from Celtic mythology - Oak, Ash and Hawthorn - and light a fire with them in the middle of a stone circle. This is an interpretation of a Celtic festival/ritual called Beltaine, which involved the lighting of fires on the Eve of May Day to mark the start of Summer and offer symbolic protection to cattle and crops. I'm also going to include interactable stones that offer historical information to make it an interactive learning experience.

This will be my first scene involving gameplay, and I hope to employ all of my skills including using UE4's sequencer and Blueprints, 3D modelling, texturing, environment art, audio and music composition. My plan is to spread this project over semesters 2 and 3 so I can really make it as good as it can be. 

I have created a Pinterest board of reference images which can be seen by clicking here.

Here's some pictures of my rough sketches:

And a couple of books that I withdrew from the library.

I've also made a quick level block-out in Maya to help myself visualise the level scale and layout. The level will be a cross shape, with the stone circles located in the centre and a tree in each of the smaller offshoots. The longest offshoot is where the player starts.

Stay tuned for more updates on this new project!

Spontaneous Sunday: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas

For this week's Spontaneous Sunday, I have played Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (2006, Ubisoft, Xbox 360).

"Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas is the sixth game in the Rainbow Six series of video games. It was released for the Xbox 360 on November 21, 2006. The game's storyline follows a new Rainbow team that is dispatched to Las Vegas, Nevada to defeat international terrorist Irena Morales and her army of mercenaries that is repeatedly attacking key locations in the city."

- Wikipedia on Rainbow Six Vegas

What do I expect?

This is the first and only Tom Clancy game that I have played. As a complete beginner to the franchise, I'm going in somewhat blind, though I have seen and read quite a bit about the franchise. I expect it to be a first-person shooter with tactical or strategic elements and perhaps several approaches to missions and different paths through levels.

I expect that the game's Las Vegas setting will allow for some pretty impressive environments and set-pieces. While conducting research on game environments for one of my assignments last semester, I read a book that contained a case-study about the level design of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and it gave an in depth analysis of how much consideration went into one of the levels in the game, so I expect that Rainbow Six Vegas will also have some high-quality level design.

I expect the game to have quite a serious tone and story. I also expect that it may have some stealth elements to it.

First Impressions - What do I think of the game in its first few minutes?

The game begins with a start screen of the game's logo and the camera sweeping around above Las Vegas' skyline, accompanied by serious and tense music. Left idle for a minute or so, a demo/ cinematics plays showing cutscene-style firefights, gameplay and some of the game's characters. This video is pretty dramatic and gives me high hopes for the game and an idea of what to expect.

Shot from the demo cinematic

The front end menu is simple and effective, if a bit unadventurous. I started a new game and chose normal difficulty. The first level actually takes place in Mexico rather than Vegas and begins with the player character in a helicopter en-route to a mission site while being briefed for the mission. My first thought was that the graphics are better than I expected from a game that is eleven years old. Arriving at the drop-off point, my character zip lined down into a back street and the action began. My first objective is to regroup with my team, and the game began to cover the basics of taking cover, shooting from cover, flanking enemies and so on. I realised at this point that taking cover and tactical movement would be a big focus of the gameplay - which makes sense, as its a realistic shooter.

Start of level 1, before being dropped into action.

I also noticed that the environments also look really good for a 2006 game. Things such as dust particle effects, warm lighting, detail objects and presence of ambient audio and a distant radio playing Mexican music all added to the environments authenticity. This first level does a good job of introducing the main gameplay systems by offering lots of cover, different routes to take and opportunities to try out silenced weapons and the "snake cam", a small camera used to see under doors.

Introduction to basic cover mechanics.

The Snake Cam allows you see under doors and plan your attack.

It wasn't long before I had rendezvoused with my squad on the roof of a church and began learning how to give them commands such as moving around, following or holding position and interacting with things. My squad and I reached a train-yard, took out some enemies then rappelled into a lower level and the next level began.

The AI team mates are actually very useful.

Overall it was a good start to the game. The early game visuals and environment were nice, and the mechanics were well-introduced. The only negatives that I picked up on is that there is no sprint or jump ability which makes movement feel a bit wooden, and the filter applied to the screen when your health is low makes the screen look like it has motion blur and isn't very easy on the eye. 

What do I like about the game? What does it do well?

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas has a lot going for it and, in many ways, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the graphics and the variety and depth of the mechanics. I can imagine that, upon its release in 2006, the game will have been very well received.

A casino is a very interesting setting for an FPS game.

The game's graphics are definitely one of its strongest features. The characters, weapons, vehicles and environments all look very realistic for a game from 2006 - they may be the best graphics I've seen in a game of this age. With the game being primarily set in Las Vegas, there's also a lot of interesting sights to see. I've never seen a casino environment in an FPS before and it works really well, with brightly lit and colourful casino floors aswell as vaults and back corridors. The environments also feature lots of destructible objects and glass to shatter which adds an even greater sense of chaos to the already-hectic gameplay.

The camera switches seamlessly from 1st to 3rd person in cover.

The gameplay is also pretty solid and theres a lot of quite interesting mechanics at work. The squad control system is a particularly strong mechanic and is somewhat similar to the system in Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (reviewed a couple of Sundays ago), but Rainbow Six Vegas pulls it off better.

You can have your squad follow you or move of their own accord, take cover, attack in different ways and breach doors and they always act well to what you need them to do. Squad control systems can often be awkward and annoying to use, and AI team mates can sometimes be liabilities rather than helpful, but this is not the case in Rainbow Six Vegas. This feature, along with the opportunity to approach and navigate areas in different ways, also adds something of a tactical element to the game that helps to set it apart from other similar games. Other strong mechanics include rappelling and the "snake cam".

The level design is another positive point, and its clear that the designers have put a lot of consideration into the levels so that they play well to the game's core mechanics and offer a lot of choice in terms of routes and play styles. You can use a tactical map that shows the level's layout so you can choose which routes to take, and see enemy and ally positions and interactable objects and use this information to inform your choices in the game.

Another good feature is the variety of weapons and equipment at your disposal, and the different opportunities that these provide. You have access to a wide range of guns including assault rifles, snipers and machine guns and you can customise them with attachments. You also get gear such as grenades, breaching charges and flash bangs that add even more variety to the gameplay and allows you to switch up your play style.

The Outfitting menu allows you to choose weapons and gear.

What do I not like?

For all its positive points, Rainbow Six Vegas is not without its downsides. Firstly, theres a few things that lead me to believe that the game lacks replay value. The missions offer only the main, critical-path objectives. With no bonus objectives or collectables hidden around the levels, there will be little to motivate the player to replay the level. The missions don't have scores or any ending stats to speak of. If there was a score system or even a simple "Gold, Silver, Bronze" performance grade, this would add a lot of replay value. Also, some of the levels are very big with lots of offshoot rooms and little areas that would be perfect for a hidden item but instead feel sadly like wasted space.

Another downside is that the game doesn't do enough to ground its story or the motivation behind the action that occurs. Aside from some dialogue that occurs before and sometimes during the missions, its hard to tell what the overall reason for the characters being there is. Without a good idea of whats going on in the story, the game loses a bit of its impact. This problem could be solved with the simple addition of a short paragraph on the pause menu that allows the player to quickly check the back story of the mission.

Theres also the rather minor issue of the lack of a sprint or jump ability, which makes the player character feel a little bit clunky and powerless. Finally, the inventory system could probably be better, as you have to hold buttons and select with the directional pad to change to your secondary weapon or change your equipped grenade, which, in the heat of battle, can be distracting.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas is really quite a high quality game. It offers some really good graphics and environments, interesting mechanics and gameplay possibilities, AI team members that are actually useful, varied weapons and a healthy degree of tactical choice. The lack of replay value and story establishment does take something away though and the game feels like it has a very slight lack of substance. Nevertheless, the positives outweigh the negatives to make this a good game.