The Open Book: Diving into the Literary World
Advisor: Mr. Aaron Betcher
Internship Location: YouTube
Onsite Mentor: Ms Vanessa Shing
Sixty five percent of people are visual learners, and being one myself brought me to constantly find different resources to visually understand books. As I read books for highschool, I kept a mental picture of each environment to better visualize every moment of each page. I will be recreating my personal representations of settings from the most widely read books at school to teach other students that everyone can have their own sandbox in their head to play around with. I hope to eventually help students better envision the books they read. Other visually inspiring environments from movies, like Whiplash, will also be included as part of the series. To help students in middle and high school in their English classes, this project will display each environment by allowing the student to navigate through different environments through a menu, shown through a book, which uses left and right arrow keys to navigate through pages. Once the student is set on exploring an environment, they can take a “deep dive” into it, which allows them to explore the Unreal Engine render on a deeper level. Furthermore, this environment will be published as a game.
Project Blog
Post 1: The Open Book -- Diving into the Literary World
Intro Week 0
Hi! I’m Winston, and this will be the beginning of my journey towards making an “educational” game, where it’s mostly just me dumping everything I read onto Unreal Engine.
To start, I had trouble understanding the books we read in class after moving several times between the U.S. to China. I would always spend time and effort imagining the physical spaces and building every environment in my head.
By imagining the setting, I grounded myself in the story, allowing myself to pay full attention. I still remember each room I made for stories I read in 5th grade, even if I forget the plot and even the title.
While reading has always been an exhilarating task for me throughout middle and high school, I’ve helped myself understand more advanced reads. For this project, I will be recreating my representations of settings from the most widely read books at school, to teach other students that everyone can have their sandbox in their head to play around with, and I hope to eventually help students better envision the books they read.
I’ve started training myself in creating 3D models and environments, and I have found several good resources like textures.com, production crate, and art station for inspiration and assets. In preparation for next week, I plan to start the interface layout for my game, from the main menu to the user interface. To do this, I plan to create several concept arts that will be helpful for my modeling process. If I manage to find enough assets this week, I plan to start working further into my project, starting with producing the environment layouts.
Happy reading:D
Stay tuned for next week’s blog!
Post 2: The Open Book–Diving into the Literary World
Welcome back to my blog!
This week, I am in Tokyo, the center of diverse architectural styles. While I’m spending time exploring different places like alleyways and Mount Fuji, I am also trying to find inspiration for the compositions for castles within my games. While this won’t be 100% parallel with my project, taking inspiration and compositional ideas from the real world can be effective in creating in-game environments.
Additionally, this week, I had almost no access to a laptop, so a lot of research was done on my phone. Thus, I wasn’t able to start my Unreal Engine main menu, but I did find several tutorials that could help with my later progression.
Before starting my scene, I have to first identify the style of the game, from the main menu to the rendering. To do this, I’ve researched ways to create main menus. Upon researching, I’ve found three ways to create the graphic. I could use an animated 3D render to create a similarly styled menu screen as the game, or I could draw a gif animation that acts as the main menu, squeezing small parts of each environment that I will be making. The last and worst option is to draw out the graphic, which will be more boring than the other options. An example of the 2D animated menu can be the Balloon Tower Defense 6 Main Menu, as the monkeys in the scene move around and the mountains in the distance do too. 3D scenes are a lot less common but can be found here and there, like Valorant’s pre-game loading screen. While an animation of a 3D Valorant agent model is played, the background has a very free feeling to it as it depicts mountains in the distance with leaves blowing in the wind. Ultimately, these all convey different feelings and could be used in places outside of the main menu. However, for my game, I decided to use a 3D animation for the main menu.
The 3D animation will be featured in the same artistic style as my game, which I found to be best in a 2.5 dimensional cartoon style. After researching, I’ve found the following video that has a side-by-side comparison between realistic and cartoon styles, and an in-depth explanation on how to create the same effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZH4jCO4ZM&ab_channel=MattAspland
I ultimately chose this style because of its appeal to younger audiences, which will be fitting for the purpose of my project. I found that deeper messages are made more fun with a cartoon style as I visited the Ghibli Museum. Young children to young adults were all in awe of the aesthetic beauty of the animations. This style, however, will be a challenge to create in 3D, but with plentiful resources on the internet, like https://www.artstation.com/artwork/J9Bgm0, I will try my best to commit to sticking to the style.
In conclusion, this week, I took notes on the represented books and researched for resources that will be helpful during development. This preparation will be particularly helpful for next week, as I start to establish my project within Unreal Engine.
Post 3: The Open Book–Diving into the Literary World
Thanks for coming back for this short read! This week, I am in Shanghai, the center of several popular game companies that thrive globally, like Hoyoverse, Epic Games, Blizzard, etc. With the abundance of in-game resources, I am starting to develop my game file, starting with the menu. As I mentioned in my syllabus, I referenced Unreal University’s tutorial on creating the main menu, but I will be adding to what I’ve learned from the video by developing a moving background, which as I established in my last post, will be a 3D animation that will display all three maps, separated by lightning. I’ve started modeling the 3D landscapes that I will be using for this animation, starting with the desert from The Alchemist. To achieve an uneven surface effect, I chose to use noise texturing, which displaces a surface using variables.
However, I disliked how the surface was constantly uneven, so I decided to lower the roughness scale, which ended up with a more visually pleasing effect.
When I saw the smoothed surface, I felt that this should be more suitable for a snowy landscape, which perfectly matches the description for The Giver’s “Elsewhere”. That’s why I eventually tried to represent The Alchemist’s desert with a different method, displacement mapping. Displacement mapping uses a grey-scale image to create a model that protrudes upwards according to the lighter parts of the image.
Currently, I’m still working on making the dune shapes render correctly, instead of being pitch black. That is it for the progress that I’ve made for this week.
Week 3
Hi! Welcome back to my project! This week was quite busy since it was my first week interning at a game company! There, I worked with the Game Design Team for Farlight 84, a third-person shooter battle royale. I learned how to research, how to question my ideas, how to come up with and dispose of ideas, and many other skills. This was an eye-opener for the specificity that is put into game design. Whether the media says a feature is good or not, doesn’t mean it's a good decision to change it immediately. A thorough in-game survey is a good way to solve the problem of getting information. This experience may give me only some help with my project, but I think familiarizing myself with the industry and workflow will greatly help my ability to create in the long run.
This week, I mostly worked on prioritizing my time by shifting my focus off of the menu and into the game environment. However, the displacement-mapped sand dune landscape was not rendering properly, so now, I am finding ways to mold a dune shape through low poly cubes. I’m still new to this method, but my external advisor has helped me find several resources to obtain the shape I am going for.
Thus, this week, I am going to keep my main menu in greyscale. I won’t be adding in any backgrounds yet, but I’m going to complete the layout of what goes where how the menus link to the environments, and how the environments link to each other. This week was more of making decisions, and I hope next week can be more of me creating the landscapes
Week 4
Time Flies! It’s the end of week 4, and I’ve learned so much about the fundamental components of game development. From the 3C’s to the design of maps, I found that there was a huge gray area between what’s a good design and a bad design. That’s what I kept in mind as I reorganized my schedule for developing my senior project.
Instead of refining the background for my main menu, I have decided to prioritize my time into finishing the broad framework of the game and developing the environments.
Online, I’ve started gathering materials. I mainly focused on Unreal Engine’s official premade environments, like Electric Dreams Environment and Medieval Game Environment. These environments contain not just the necessary meshes, but also several lighting, particle, and systematic resources that will help my development of the environment much easier.
So far, I’ve noticed that I need to create meshes of the things that will help me transition from one environment to another. I will be designing these meshes after I complete arranging my environments.
Week 5
Hi! This is my last week at my internship, so I would like to start with a few conclusions. First, the working environment for the game industry is great despite the long hours at work. This may be due to the fact that I am working at a Chinese company, but everyone seems to be serious about work here. Otherwise, the office/campus is great, there is a gym, gaming room, and drawing room, along with many others. I worked on market research for the game and learned in-depth ways to statistically compare and contrast products. Overall, this experience was great and eye-opening.
For my senior project, I worked on debugging several things about the main menu and moved on to the environments. The environments right now have an established landscape, but I believe they could look better, so I will be working on that for the next few weeks including Spring Break
Week 6
Hello! This week, I worked on bringing The Giver’s Elsewhere near to its final draft. I’ve sculpted the landscape with more segmentation while adding foliage (trees, plants, and natural entities) that help with guiding users to locations I want them to be in. I used examples from battle royale games that use mountains to section different areas, and meshes from many different sources, from the internet to Unreal Engine’s official “Quixel Bridge”.
It took a long time for me to figure out the best solution to create a landscape material that supports the different looks on natural snow surfaces. In the end, I decided to use four materials that cover natural snow, windswept snow (for open land), snow with grass (for tree areas), and snow with rocks (for melted or rocky areas). I used the water plugin, which is generally available with Unreal Engine, to provide variety. I tried to replicate how water becomes darker in a snowy/empty landscape.
After establishing the landscape and obstacles, I used the meshes I used from earlier projects to create a house that is surrounded by trees. I added trees to make the house look less simple.
In the end, I noticed that all of the imported 3D models couldn’t collide, which allowed the user to walk through it. I solved this by adding invisible blocks inside of each mesh to make it feel like each object was solid.
I still plan to add minor details, like fog before moving on to the scene from The Alchemist
Week 7
Hi and welcome back to my vlog! This week, I focused all of my time into creating The Alchemist’s Oasis, which the book described as a paradise-like place. I started by importing a displacement map (creating a landscape using a black and white image that encodes depth and altitude). Sadly, it took several tries due to Unreal Engine crashing from the size of the imported map, so I eventually used photoshop to crop out unneeded pixels, leading to a smaller workload on my computer when creating the environment.
I based my map design off of a pool of water that I began the build with. I painted grass around the water and imported buildings arranged to focus on a spread out and developed community until I realized that the society was arranged in a more makeshift way. They used tents and did not build as much of a developed city as I initially believed. I moved all of the buildings into the distance to show nearly civilizations. After developing the environment, I realized that there were many details that I missed, like distant battles, easter eggs (that I should’ve added earlier), and interactions.
From playing the game, I found the game to not have enough content or that players can’t tell what books each environment was from. I decided to create pop-up messages that display information on the context, quotes, and take-aways.
As I develop new goals for myself, I have decided to not create the Whiplash environment and focus on the experience for the two existing maps. I want them to not only be visually pleasing, but also have great content.