Interactive Characters - s5294895 Dharma MacDonald

  Progress At this point, it seems almost ironic that this is the title of this section of my journal. Because what I have made this week is not, in fact, progress, but I have backtracked about a month of progress. I have mentioned that my project has had trouble building. Well, it turns out that not only is it having trouble building, but it is eating itself from the inside out and slowly destroying both itself and my sanity (and potentially the universities computers.) I've come to the unfortunate realisation that attempting to resolve this issue is futile, and I've wasted the past few weeks trying to fix this error. It would've been easier to backtrack from the beginning. I've lost progress in my attempt to embark on this quest alone. Alas, I am stubborn and it has taken me half a trimester to come to this conclusion. It was when I hit my breaking point, in the middle of class and no work to show for myself other that an blue screen of utter humiliation and a few me...

  Playtesting Unfortunately due to major issues with building the project, I was unable to get many people to playtest the project. I did manage to get a few people to playtest the game in the editor (which, while perhaps not true to the final build, was the closest I was to getting there that I would likely get). As shown, it's pretty clear that while the player was easy to control and what the player needed to do was clear, the actual game play wasn't very engaging. This was expected, as the game cinematic wasn't finished. I did have one player comment that the dialogue (which had been implemented in a very basic manner) was interesting and they were curious about the story of the world that I had built.  Progress Unfortunately due to the build error I didn't get to make much progress on the build this week. I decided against advancing the cinematic in case I had to backtrack my progress and restart due to the build error.  The output log for the project continued to ...

  What is the premise of the Assignment 2 project? The current premise of the project is to deliver a short cinematic sequence to express narrative. The cinematic will feature a conversation between two players that provide exposition to the tasks the player would later undergo in a great slice of the overall game. I've been managing this project through Jira in order to visualise my tasks and stay on track.  Production challenges you have faced? Currently the biggest production challenge I am trying to face is my lack of being able to build the project. Currently, when i attempt to build the project, the software crashes and doesn't give a discernible reason to it's failure. I have attempted to remedy this by asking for assistance but unfortunately nobody else was able to pinpoint what the error was. I've been working on parts of the project that I can outside of the engine while I try to fix the error. I've looked into various blueprints and still can't figure...

  Progress This week I furthered the characterisation of my player character in order to refine the dialogue for the scene.  I begin planning out character behaviour, motivations and beliefs; I also began to plan out how the scene would properly play out before I started thumbnailing the storyboard for the cinematic.  In terms of in-engine progress, I more effectively laid out the scene to direct the player which direction they need to go.  The enclosed walkway, as originally designed, automatically directs the player in the correct direction. As well as this, arrows are used to direct the player.  I also began working on setting up the level sequence that would trigger the cutscene. At the moment I am using another Epic Games character from the unreal marketplace.  Resources and Links Paragon: Yin in Epic Content - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)

Work Completed this week This week, I wanted to focus much more on polishing certain aspects of my game rather than trying to create something I wasn't confident that I could execute a polished version of. After reviewing feedback, I decided I was going to primarily focus on the cinematic of the game, rather than the dialogue tree.  For this, I still needed polished dialogue, but didn't have to worry about branching story lines. I began reworking the dialogue I had already written to fit this new sequence.  Because I was focusing on the cinematic of the scene, I also wanted the look of the scene to be to a high enough standard that it didn't detract from the scene. To do this, I refined the celshader to include an outline to make the shapes of the scene more distinctive. As well as this, I changed the player character to more fit the narrative of the story I was creating. I decided to use a character I found on unreal engine marketplace in order to give myself more time to ...

  What feedback have you received on your current progress? In terms of feedback for my current progress; I think I've been focusing too much on the layout and feel of the environment when the focus of the task isn't the environment, but the interactions. I may have neglected the implementation of the dialogue until fairly recently and that has definitely had an effect on my progress so far. Moving forward I'm definitely going to prioritise the interaction and making them smooth and "juicy."  Greybox On top of this, when I had some people playtest the dialogue, while the story flowed well, the actual dialogue felt a little bit clunky. Based on this feedback, I rewrote some of the dialogue lines to feel more "natural". To do this, I read a few articles on "natural" scriptwriting and found my original dialogue did feel a little bit stilted. (MacGregor, 2021)  The above is the dialogue I tested with playtests; I watched their reaction and asked fo...