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Sword Generation:

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Sword Research

For this post I wanted to look into some different neon sword designs to help me inspire my own ideas. I gathered some images to create a moodboard.

I think my main takeaways from these designs are that:

Edge of the blade is glowing in an outline while the inside is a contrasting colour

designs are normally quite sleek

Some feature multiple glowing points besides just the blade

I was discussing this with a friend and he said what a really cool idea would be is to make the hilt of the sword a Microphone. He suggested this as for my game youre obviously only using a microphone as the main input so our thinking behind this is that youre talking into the sword commanding it what to do.

From this I went and found a tutorial for creating a microphone in blender as I thought it would be a good idea to find out how the Mic mesh is created!

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Making Notes Move

I started off by doing some research as I wanted to use actors instead of characters for the noteblocks as I feel like it means theres less customization that I have to do. For this to work I had to find out how to make an actor smoothly move to a location!

I found this UE Forum post which helped!

Here is how it looks in game:

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Goals for Today

Morning:

Finish Research Blocks/Notes ✔️

Finish Create Arrow Note Model write up ✔️

Finish Research Platforms + environment (which player is standing on) ✔️

Afternoon:

Research Swords

Create Sword

Start working on making the Notes Move and add to a points system when hit! ✔️+🚧

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Creating the Notes!

Alright! So to start off I made some simple extrudes on a cube to get a rough shape of an arrow and pulled some of the vertices around. I then added some bevels to make the edges smoother and duplicated the arrow shape.

The reason I duplicated it was to shrink it and hollow out the inside of the arrow which is where the neon glow would be. I would do this by using the new boolean modifier I learnt about in a previous post!

Here is what it looks like after being hollowed out:

After this I then imported the model into UE to get to work on setting up the glowing materials. I think the design appears sharp and obvious for the player!

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Note Block/Arrow Research

This section of my research is what is going to aid in my note block development, I first had a look at a game I've mentioned in my research a couple of times now and that is Beat Saber. Here is my analysis on the design:

I love how the direction of which you should swing its made to be brighter and contrasts with the block colour. I think this ensures that the player can easily distinguith the direction. With my own design I plan to incorporate a similar method of having the direction glow

Next I had a look at was Moon Rider which is a Beat Saber clone played in a vr headset browser. The notes in this differ from the beat saber ones in a way I personally prefer! Here is my analysis

I think from this it might be a better idea to have the block itself be shaped in the direction youre supposed to swing instead of a symbol. I think this makes it more obvious for the player as it becomes easier to understand.

I then google searched for some other types of notes in non vr rythm games and came across this image which I really liked as it conforms to a more standard style of arrow that is greater recognised. I think I will take this design and combine it with the apsects I liked from the previous note types!

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World Lighting Changes

I just wanted to make a quick blog post to show off the lighting changes I have made to the world. I thought in accordance to my research I needed to make the game much darker to ensure the neon lights were standing out. I also found a really neat ue5 engine material which I duplicated and made my own but I will get onto that in a second!

First, the lighting.

as you can see I have gone for a gey background thats not too dark to avoid a loss of depth and detail but still retains some colour!

Next the Material, this was a grid material stored in the UE engine content which I duplicated and moved to the games main content drawerer.

I then created a blueprint for the block notes to spawn at and added my material the base!

Here is how it looks in the world:

Overall I think the games visuals are starting to come togehter now I just need to move onto making the note blocks!

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Platform

I tried to create the platforms design in Fusion360 as I thought this would be easier to get a symmetrical shape and cut specific holes into them.

While this did work I then imported it into blender to set up the materials but the topology was awful and did not translate good at all. So it left me no choice but to remake it in blender!

My issue was cutting specific shaped holes in the object so I did some research and came across this video which helped a lot. It makes use of the Boolean modifier to cut holes into objects by using other shapes:

I then set up the materials for different sections of the model and imported it into unreal to add textures. Here is what this looks like:

Overall I think this model is really neat. It for sure has captured that neon desired theme I was trying to achieve with this model and I will ensure that I will keep it up for the next models!

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World Art Research + Platform Research

This section of research is where I take a look at some ideas for a platform for the player to stand on, along with some neon themed games.

First off I took a look at the most similar game to my chosen idea being Beat Saber. I looked at some screenshots and did some analysis on the art style choices:

From this I believe for my game I should encorperate this simple style of having lots of contrast with the dark environment pieces and then having maybe a colour or two to define these pieces with a neon outline. I also think its interesting how the game focuses all the light on the platform as I initially suspected this would be too big of a distraction from the colour of the note blocks.

I also had a bit more of a look at the platform:

^ Gameplay Video shows lots of background lighting effects that change with the song. This could be something to look into when developing my game.

Next i had a look at Cyber Hook which is a game I've spent a few hours playing in the past. This is a really cool movement game where you navigate neon synthwave environments with your grappling gun. I also did another analysis on the games environement design!

I really like the grounds gridlike pattern. I think I want to try to incorporate something similar to this in my own project. I also really like the synth sun and think that would make a nice addition to my background. Lastly I really liked how the game had some sort of particles in the sky, I really like the idea of including something similar to this in my game around the player character!

^ gameplay video which showcases the visuals in action!

Now moving onto a more in depth look at platforms I gathered some images in a moodboard to aid in my own design!

[alternativecontrollersgdd]

Goals for Today

Research Blocks/Notes 🚧

Create Arrow Note Model 🚧

Research Platforms (which player is standing on) 🚧

Create a platform ✔️

Set the scene environments lighting ✔️

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Research Outlines Guide

here is just a little post I put together for all of the research I can think of to do at this moment for my game:

Sword Designs

Block/Note Designs

Neon themed games for environment design

Other Folliage/Prop Research

Outline Materials for specific objects (neon effect)

Emojis status copy n paste:

✔️(DONE) 🚧(IN PROGRESS) ❌(NOT STARTED)

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Outline Material

As I want to go for a NEON + Toon style approach to my game I wanted to start off by finding a method for creating a nice thick black toon outline. I went through a couple of tutorials and tried a few different options. The first tutorial I watched was this one:

I wanted to try and get a neon style outline but that didnt really work perfectly as it was highlighting big surfaces on some objects which was really annoying. Here is what that looked like:

So instead I had a further look into alternative tutorials and found this one by Matt Aspland who is a known creditable UE5 developer who had a really good tutorial on how to do this. What I liked about his tutorial is it leaves lots of room for customization as you can control the outline thickness, colours and what object it applies to (Render CustomDepth Pass) !

Here is how this looks:

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Goals for today

Write project proposal ✔️

Setup a toon outline in UE5 ✔️

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Idea 3

For this final Idea I still wanted to keep up this idea of being hands free but instead I'd have some form eye tracking instead of sound input. So this game if you were wanting something detailed you would need lots of screen prompts for the player to be looking at. I wanted to avoid this. Instead I thought about maybe having a spotting game using this eye tracking. The first game that isnt actually a video game that came to mind was:

Where's Wally? - This is a game all about spotting Wally in dense crouds which tests your visual skills! I think it would be really cool to utilise this in a game format using eye tracking. Bouncing off of this, it reminded me of an old Michael Reeves video that I watched a few years ago where he created a very similar thing!

From this in terms of the games theme I think I would design a low poly themed game based in an open area with a dense amount of people shuffling around. And the player will need to be focussing on the character we are trying to spot for an extended amount of time.

A similar game to this Just act Natural which is an online party game where players must hide among NPC characters to avoid detection from the seeker while moving around.

^ gameplay video

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Idea 2

For my next Idea I wanted to continue with my hands free approach with the microphone but instead of word prompts I want this game to focus on the pitch of the mic or loudness of the inputs. From this I realistically can only get two inputs consistently as reaching certain loudness levels may prove too difficult for some people, especially to maintain that. SO from this I thought it might be a good idea to look into single input games! I did a quick google search and go these Two as the standout ones:

Flappy Bird: as we all should know in flappy bird you tap the screen to make the bird flap and stay airborne while avoiding pipes. I think the single input adjusts the bird's vertical position, creating a challenge of timing and rhythm. I believe this could be integrated with voice input quite well by going "AHH" to make it move consistently up!

The next game was Jetpack Joyride which follows a similar concept to flappy bird except the longer you hold your input the more momentumn you gain moving upwards whereas flappy bird is only a single once input it cannnot be held. I think this game defintely offers a bit more gameplay variety in terms of dodging multiple traps and obsticles along with getting a bunch of different power ups.

I think if i were to persue this Idea I would really like to combine jetpack joyrides continuous held input with flappy birds precise character placing through the pipes. Along with this maybe potentially incorporate some upgrades and other projectiles to dodge!

[alternativecontrollersgdd]

Idea 1

Alright so for my first Idea I wanted to avoid the use of hands as the main controller as everything I have researched into so far has all needed either you hands or some form of movement as the games primary input. Instead of this I thought why not use vocals, such as speaking word prompts into a microphone. Based off of this I took a look into a really noteable game that I've personally put a LOT of hours into that make use of your microphone as a primary input:

That game is Phasmophobia. This game makes use of many voice inputs to trigger paranormal events in game such as telling the ghost to "show yourself" or repeating the ghosts name to upset it more. As well as this, speaking too loudly can also alert the ghosts to your presence!

I also found this website which provides all the different voice line inputs:

I think it would be really cool to have a player interacting with the game by saying voice prompts. The only thing I want to avoid with this though is having too many for the player to where it becomes confusing. So my thinking behind this is to follow the roots of the arcade games I looked at and have maybe a handfall of inputs.

I did a quick bit of research to find if there are any speech recognition plugins for UE5 and I found this:

I then had to think for what this game is even going to be about. I want for this to be more "arcadey" and retro in its style to better suit the simplicity of visuals and inputs to potentially play on a nostalgia factor in players. So for visuals I think I would aim to create something similar to my arcade project of last yeah with its pixel post processing and the cel shader to go with it!

Then moving onto what the games about, I really like the idea of creating a rythm game that shares similarities to beat saber. I would have directional prompts such as, "Up", "Down", "Left", "Right" along with a "Switch" voice to change the colour of the sword/saber to match the colour of the blocks. I like the idea of sticking to two colours to ensure that the game doesnt get too complex as I do want to focus quite big on the visual side of this game as thats where I want to persue. When it comes to visuals and the block colours I want to made different colour blind options for the blocks which will affect their colours in game to make them easily distinguishable.

Bouncing off of this is that I have to consider how the player will navigate the menus so i think there will also need to be some voice prompts for pausing and resuming the game!

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Now Play This + Accessability Research

As part of the next stage of my research I had a look at this website which provided many articles for the different aspects of game making. I looked at these two in particular which I found interesting!

In this article features a toy that allows for people to create inventions out of their waste cardboard at home using a holepunch, their own connectors. I really like this as it promotes recyclability and sustainability while it can also be seen as a way of developing a younger audiences creativity. The people behind SnapKit host a drop-in session to come and try it out and experiment with their tool! Overall I think this is a really cool product that promotes a greener future with how we go about and see our waste products packaging.

This was the other article that I looked at which I thought was also really interesting. Carboard beats Keyboard is a hands on crafts workshop that get people to be considering alternative inputs for games avoiding general controller conventions (which is similar to what we are doing in this project). They provide examples of this such as a hat controller, a mouth operated switch or pair of foil cymbals to control some sort of input for games. I think what theyre aiming to do with this is really good as it opens people up to the other possibilities of controller designs!

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Accessability in Games

I had a read through the presentation provided again about why Accessibility Matters in games. To start off, it creates big benefits for players with disabilities as you can have features that allow for them to have Customizable controls, captioning,and adaptable difficulty settings. This doesnt just benefit people with disabilities though as it can crean advantages for all Gamers as thet can enable subtitles for noisy environments and can remap their control schemes to be more ergonomic for their own personal preference. Finally, all of this promotes equality, diversity, and representation in games due to the customizability being so open.

After some research, another common feature is colourblind modes especially in games that have prompts for this.

^ this is a really good and informative video on the types and ways that colourblindness is taken into account during the development process!

Here is a really good image to better represent the types of colour blindness compared to being able to see full colours: