Development Week 1 (13/03/17 - 19/03/17)

I began this first development week after the initial planning stages by drafting out three track designs using Adobe Illustrator (shown below), and bringing them to my group members to vote on which would be best for the game's starting track. We all decided on the first one in the end, due to the simplicity and how it also demonstrates all of the game's main mechanics well in one level: like anti-gravity sections, jumps, shortcuts and a corkscrew turning section. Afterwards I recreated a more polished, annotated version properly demonstrating the track's features (also shown below), and passed it onto the main concept artist to draw the track's map layout in more detail.

  

Draft 1

Draft 2

Draft 3

The more finalised, annotated version of draft 1

I started designing the track piece-by-piece in UE4 using a placeholder track piece from the Advanced Vehicle UE4 Starter Kit, which was a very long and tedious process. However thanks to some helpful advice from Dan, he recommended a good tutorial series using splines to procedural generate track pieces (modelled by Ty) instead following along said spline! Which means I can make the track flow and curve with ease as naturally as I want, choosing how spaced-out each track part is, which in a fast-paced and anti-gavity racing game like ours, is critical when it comes to being able to design long and windy tracks as head level-designer.

Optimisation and professional practises, using add instanced static mesh is much more efficient than adding a static mesh for each point on a spline when the project is compiling.

I started designing the track piece-by-piece in UE4, but thanks to some helpful advice from Dan, he recommended a good tutorial series by (DokipenTech) using splines too procedurally generate track pieces instead! Which both saved a lot of time, and also allowed me to be more flexible and 'wavy' with my track design, featuring many turns and curves without needing dedicated track pieces created for each one. Likewise, I've been following professional working practices throughout development, creating regular backups between working sessions on both my USB hard-drive and OneDrive clod storage.

An issue I ran into however was poor management on the modelling side of things, as the 3d modeller behind the track pieces was two days late in sending me the file, and as I needed it to begin the initial stage blockout, I was left with a hiatus where I had to work on other things in that time (like this development blog!) Once sent to me, the file was not in the .fbx format, but .mb (native to Maya) which led to a brief debate on professional working practises and time management. This is because me installing a whole suite of software (Autodesk Maya), and then exporting the model myself to import into UE4 wastes a lot of potential development time that be spent directly importing the model into the engine in seconds. Fortunately this brief misstep was solved, and it will be mitigated in the future by the modellers sending me the appropriate file formats for the job I will be working on (in this case, .fbx files).

However, I was able to finally import the textured track-piece into the engine, allowing me to now make fully curved and dynamic tracks as shown below! However, an issue we found upon testing was that these track pieces can't be rotated vertically to create anti-gravity sections, which is a concern I will bring-up in the next group meeting to see if there are any workarounds to this and if the programmers can lend a hand in troubleshooting.