Substance

This was the first time I used any Substance software. however, due to the complications I encountered modelling my assets I only had two weeks to fully texture all assets.


For assets which had overlapping models such as the wardrobe I seperated each model and textured them separately. I used a variety of alphas to help add detail to several models.

 

Lighting

For the lighting I wanted to go for similar lighting to Paranormal Activity. I liked the unique blue hue used and wanted to try and recreate it. I used a Point Light to create the blue hue. I also rotated the directional light to help make the skybox darker.

For the room light I used another point light and selected a warm yellow to create a light bulb emitted look.

For the Nightlight I added another point light as well as an emissive texture to the nightlight bulb and TV screen. I added spotlights to the TV screen for added effect.

For the Lightening I added a spotlight and two directional lights. I positioned the spotlight above a duplicate of the tree with shadows on and textures off. The tree shown in the window does not emit shadows. This is how I created the tree show on the carpet.

Cutscene

I decided to create a basic cutscene to help explain the story and objective of the game. I did this in the form of a children's show to help convey the message that the player is a child. I Played this on the TV for authenticity and believability. Players can select the next slide by pressing A or skiping the scene entirely by pressing Start.

Game Design

Due to the feedback from my Alpha and the production schedule there was several gameplay features I had to change. The first was the crib sequence. Originally I wanted the player to wake up in the crib after a sequence was completed. I wanted to try and recreate the PT style of walking through the door to the same environment with minor changes to progress the story and play. I removed this feature as I didn't have the time to perfect that style of play in the time I had remaining. Had I had more time or the scripting knowledge I would of attempted to keep this feature. 

Another feature I removed was the Ouija board interaction. Player feedback revealed that players didn't understand nor believed why a child would have or be scared of an Ouija board. Due to this I tried to adapt my story to work the Ouija board into a believable context. I failed to achieve this and I removed it from the game. 

I decided to replace these features with collectible dolls. Opting for a Slender approach, the player would collect the dolls in order to avoid the monster. These dolls would appear collected upon wall mounted shelves to indicate they have been collected. Each doll collected will activate an event to help create atmosphere and tension. I created a doll manager script which managed all these features.

I used trigger boxes and getbuttondown to initiate the functions within the script. These functions were often called through coroutines. This proved effective but quickly became messy as at first I wasn't stopping the coroutines. This contradicted other scripts and caused game breaking bugs. To fix this I called coroutines in other scripts in order to stop them correctly. In some cases I had to deactivate the script or object itself once said action was complete. 

3D Modelling

I felt fairly confident when starting my 3D models. My goal after graduation is to apply for a 3D Asset artist position, so I knew I had to work efficiently. However, I immediately encountered several issues particularly with my first model, the wardrobe.

 I encountered a error in Maya when trying to unfold my UVs. The error was warning me I had non-manifold edges and that my topology needed correcting. I never encountered this error before which made it difficult to identify the issue. This error prevented me to unfold my UVs and therefore it was important that I tried to correct it.

It took me a while before finding the error. The issue was certain faces became 5 sided or more after I beveled edges. It was easy to spot with larger faces, but the smaller the bevel the harder it was for me to spot any irregularities.

Nevertheless, once I found the irregular faces I was able to quickly correct them by deleting and adding edges I was able to quickly correct the topology and UV unwrap my models.

But, this issue caused my production schedule to be pushed back by two weeks which in the long run effected my project.

Alpha Footage

Fading In and Out

In my game I wanted to fade the screen in and out to simulate the player closing and opening their eyes at the start and end of each sequence.

I decided to use a sprite texture attached to the canvas and effect its alpha channel. By changing its alpha channel between 1 and 0 I can effect the GUI transparency.

However I quickly realised that standard 2D GUI does not work in VR. This is because VR can not render certain effects including standard GUI.

 I found out however you can still use the canvas and 2D sprites for VR. In order to use the fading effect I wanted I had to effect the Canvas Group instead of the texture directly.

I also had to make sure that the canvas was up close to the player camera and also attached to it. This prevented any light or objects still being viable during the fading.