GJL Game Parade Spring Jam '21 - ‘After The Storm’

It was incredibly good fun to work with Kim Lomas (Level Designer) Sean Hall (Programmer) Juliana Milusheva and Ythen Sawers (3D Artists) on 'After the Storm', a short game we made for the GJL Game Parade Spring Jam!

The theme for this jam was 'Strength Lies In Differences', and the story for our game is as follows:

“As the thunder rolls in, a catastrophic tsunami hits the once vibrant and lively beach town you reside in, separating you from your family. After finding a small boat in the place you took shelter in, you set out to find and reunite with them, but it’s the kindness of strangers that will help you on your way. As you come across survivors, you must find a way to communicate with each despite speaking different languages. Help them on your journey and they may help you in return.”

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The game is available to play directly in your browser from the itch.io page:

https://seanwhall.itch.io/after-the-storm

Music is from Phil Michalski + Brandon Boone’s ‘Digital Illusions’ pack.

Victor's Vector - UE4 Summer Jam 2019

From August 8th-13th, I took part in the 2019 UE4 Summer Jam with the Harlan Designs team (Programmer Alan Horton, Level + Game Designer Eli De Carteret + 3D Artist Lee Stockton). Together, we made Victor’s Vector, a short 3D puzzle-platformer game!

The theme for this game jam was ‘Make it count’, which inspired the game’s central mechanic - every time the player moves, the floor block they were previously standing on falls away! If the player falls off an edge, then it’s game over, so they have to make every individual movement really count!

However, if the player has collected a power-up before they fall, the game will do a stylised VHS rewind sequence back to the previous checkpoint so they can try again. Check out the video below to see how a full playthrough of the game plays out:

I designed sound effects and music for the game, and implemented them into the build using Perforce…which was quite frankly awesome! This was my first time properly using source control, and I can tell that I’m already going to really miss it whenever I have to work without the software in the future. It really helped to speed things up with my implementation workflow and enabled me to remotely work much more efficiently as a sound designer.

It was really great working with Alan, Eli and Lee on such a fun project! Obviously, with the small time scale inherent to a game jam, there were naturally areas where I wish I could have spent more time. For example, I ran out of time to make sounds for some of the block movements, such as when a block rises or falls into place after activating a switch. Having sounds in place for these events would perhaps have helped point out key information aurally to the player in a more elegant multi-modal manner. At the moment, the player has to rely only a visual information for these events, so having specific sound cues for block movements would have been a nice additional features to have in the game.

Overall though, I’m really pleased with how everything came together! I’m particularly pleased with my design and implementation of Victor’s movement sounds, as these were all sourced from various personal recordings I’d made of hand drill motor revs for the servos and light metal cup impacts for the footsteps.

Footstep and servo sounds for the cute player robot character Victor! These are triggered from moving play sound notifies in the walking animation composite.

I’m also pleased with the basic passive mixing system I had time to quickly implement for the game’s music. Using UE4’s soundclasses and a sound mix modifier, I set things up so that whenever the VHS UI widget is displayed, the music volume is slightly ducked, and vice versa when the UI widget is no longer displayed onscreen, the music returns to it’s original volume. Although this is nothing particualrly complex or groundbreaking, I’m nonetheless pleased with this mixing feature as I believe it helped give prominence and bring focus to the rewind stage of gameplay.

That’s all for now, it’s time for me to make things count myself and get back on with the work for Milksop Games and Tranzfuser!

UE4 Sequencer Tutorial - Work in Progress (31/10/17)

Thought I'd cobble together a quick video on the progress I've made while working though the Unreal Engine 4 Sequencer tutorial. I'm about halfway into this very useful YouTube series, but there's still a ways for me to go yet!

Learning how to use Sequencer has been an absolute blast so far; organising character animations, placing cameras and automating their settings basically let's you be a virtual director inside UE4! Had to temporarily break off from this project due to my ongoing course work, but will try to pick up where I left off over the Christmas break if I get chance.

Audio-wise, I've incorporated a snippet of the music from my dwarf tower defence game into the clip for the time being, as well a few choice samples. Once I've finished building the cinematic, I'll go back and do and a thorough sound design treatment for the whole piece, but for now, here's where I'm up to so far: