Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires

This week as a group we pooled our efforts together to create the first main room of our game: Duncan's Room. This room was to be completely finished this week, in order to serve as both a benchmark for the rest of the game, and as a way of judging how much time we need to dedicate to the creation of other rooms in the game.

Ellie spent the week finishing and texturing the assets she had begun working on last week. She made several variations of some of the assets, to allow for choice and variety when populating the world. It was also a good exercise in studying material definition, and growing the skills to really push texturing. To make the texturing pipeline for these assets quicker, she used a combination of Quixel Suite's DDO, and Substance Painter, allowing for fast procedural texturing, but with still enough control to not make it feel like a pre-made texture slapped on.

Chris continued working on assets much the same as last week, although through practice this has been speeding up over time. Some assets have needed to be revisited and some still will need to be again, such as the cupboard requiring more detail, but for the moment the assets are certainly usable in the level.

Hazel worked on the bed this week; it took longer than she thought it would because of problems with unwrapping but it was finished by Friday. 

We had some issues with Liv’s stone wall normals- the normals were too subtle and so weren't showing up in such a dark room. Hazel offered to take it into zbrush and sculpt in some more exaggerated rocks with turned out looking much better. 

(Liv)

Carrie has been finishing off the concepts to be worked from in the rest of the castle:

 The Hallway leading to the Stage;

 The Banquet Hall for the Stage of Banquo's cycle;

 The Theatre, this time with the audience seated - the actual positions of the audience members will probably be decided when we are placing them in engine;

 The doors in the entrance hall which lead to the different Stages per cycle - also designed the engravings on the plaques to differentiate the doors and symbolise what lies beyond;

The Coat of Arms based on the real Macbeth family crest, though changed and drawn out by hand, to be put on banners and shields etc. (as seen in the banquet hall concept).

In addition to the concepting, Carrie created an animated material for the benchmark room (and the rest of the castle) which would emulate a beam of light illuminating dust motes in the beam - aka. god rays/ light shafts etc. In the benchmark room it is being used for the spotlight beam.


It was a busy week on the engine side of things this week as everyone's (more or less) finished assets were put into engine to create a benchmark room so that we had some sort of quality guide to aim for when creating the rest of our game.

Jacob created some particle effect candle lights as well as lit the room using warm, orange lighting as well as some harsh artificial lighting you would expect to see in a theatre/on a stage. This, paired with a manually made light shaft created my Carrie and positioned by Jacob we managed to create a good looking spotlight for our stage room (it had to be manually made as light shafts for spot and point lights are yet to be implemented into UE4).

Below are some high-res beauty screenshots of our benchmark room so far. In these screenshots we are still missing the assets for the swords and dagger. We also ran into some problems when it came to the lighting on the bed (visible on the ties around the bed). This is definitely something we will be asking about next time we get the chance as we felt it really throws the whole room off once you notice it.

Other than this benchmark room, we also added a slight bit of fog to the exterior of the level, as well as introduced the mechanic that allows the player to move through to the next level once he's finished the current one.

 Next week the team splits in half for 6 weeks with one half working on characters and the other on environment. Although we’re all going to be working on different things it's going to be important that we stay in the loop and are constantly checking each other’s work.