Ryan Cooke-Ward's Portfolio

In keeping with the recent theme of AV work on the blog, I would like to finish up with a small showcase of the soundtrack, and some assets. A lot of the visuals are still a WIP and are all untextured. I quickly threw this together because I was looking to get the sound work on the blog, but unfortunately blogger doesn't allow for just sounds. There will be another post on texturing further down the line, once I am finished with most of the models. Now that I have given a good go at the AV, the blog will be a mixture and balance of Visual stuff, followed by some more architecture work and blueprints. Project Management The aim is to have the assets textured done by the 14th of April. The rest of this week (Until the 7th) will be spent getting UVWs prepared for texturing. After that, by the end of the month, I should be in a position to continue working on the game. The latter half of April will be spent getting the core mechanic of the game sorted, including a spell/abi...

The best news first: I'm half happy with what I have as a soundtrack! Soundtrack Before I go too into what I have created, I want to acknowledge the way sound works in most recent video games. A lot of horror games in particular, and a lot of Triple A titles have orchestras at the composers whim, to be able to create atmosphere, rather than song. For example, being able to crossfade certain tracks when a player views something in the background. The most classic example of this is the jump scare in horror games, suddenly slamming down on a piano or sinister strings slowly fading in. Whilst this is a great example of what audio can do in games development, this isn't my aim with my project. Instead, I want to take a step back to the NES era of themes. I'm not suggesting I can create a theme akin to Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy, but having a theme play in an area will be easier (and harder at the same time) for compositions sake, and perhaps for coding as well. For sure ...

Unfortunately, every time I screen record, the unreal engine crashes. So, I'm instead going to have to backtrack through what I have already done to try and showcase it in several screenshots instead, so that I can upload a small amount here and there whenever I have added something to the games blueprints! Woo! The following posts will be following an already existing tutorial that I will be talking through, made by user " Unreal Gaime Dev " - Please make sure to watch his tutorials and show him some love, whilst this inventory isn't clean or crisp, it is a very well functioning inventory using physical slots instead of a list. I just got done adding a very very simple currency system that currently isn't used anywhere else in the game, that's something that will come at a later date. Instead of spending two 6-hour days coding, I figured I'll stop until tomorrow and show the blog some love. The screen shot dimensions may be a little off on the ...

From the start of this week, a lot of the blog will be updated based around certain milestones to try and keep the development cycle on track. The concepts have been completed along side of a design document and a lab report, so the next steps outside of research are whiteboxing. The previous posts have hinted at some of the whitebox modeling, and by the end of this week the aim is to have all of the whitebox levels completed, and production started on a trial for HUD's and UI's.  There will also be some further development on storyboarding for the scripted scenario, and a production list required for Audio, both foley and soundtrack design. The whitebox levels will serve as a starting point and a building block for architecture in the Unreal Engine, as well as being a good start to receiving feedback. As an example, if I asked a colleague and they would be unable to distinguish the castle interior to the tailoring emporium then it will be valuable feedback and easy to c...