Hello! Welcome back to another new series of blogs which will walk through the development of a cinematic game currently being created for a University assignment. This game is being created in a team of 4 and is heavily focused on the cinematic side of games. One of the biggest new things for me will be the addition of cutscenes which I have not done before. This will be a learning curve but let's get started.
House Updates
In the last blog, there were two screen shots shown which showed the progress created on the house. Today, I am happy to show a much more in depth look at an almost finished house! The bedroom hasn't changed much other than the addition of a now completed balcony which can be seen below.
Previously shared screen shot of Theodore's Bedroom
New Balcony attached to bedroom
Instead of showing each new section of the house one by one, I decided to just create a quick walkthrough of the house which would make it quicker and easier to show you. I added the plates and toaster to the kitchen as I had found a pack for it. They are subject to change if a better asset pack can be found. Ignore the floating characters, they aren't visible in game, just in the editor. Here it is below:
Unlisted YouTube House Walkthrough
Project Scope
The scope of the project has been relooked as there is a lot less time to create this prototype than originally thought. Instead of creating two different maps, the team has chosen to keep the currently created map for Theodore's house section at the beginning of the story and to expand this section to have deeper content rather than having to create an entire separate map for the battlefield section. This change had to be made as the team simply does not have enough time to be able to create everything originally planned before the deadline.
As the team has decided to focus on one map, there is more time to make it more detailed and create a deeper connection between the player and the story. As seen in the video above with house walkthrough, there is a lot more detail in the atmosphere of the house than previously where it was very bland. For example, there are chandeliers for the lights, furniture throughout the house, tree decorations, Timmy's toys, kitchen appliances and a table with a dining set. There is still more that the team wants to add to fill every playable section of the house with something interactive, but this is a great change from how the house looked at the start.
Cutscene 1 and 2
As said in the previous blog, I am putting together the cutscenes in Unity that the team have previously designed together through the game script and storyline. At the current stage, cutscene 1 is complete, cutscene 2 is almost complete and cutscene 3 is in progress. Creating these cutscenes has been a challenge as I have never used the timeline system in Unity prior to this but, after figuring out how to use it, I have had a great time making the first two. All cutscenes are being voice acted by the team. However, the voice of Isabelle had to be AI generated as none of us could make ourselves sound like a woman with voice effects. Therefore, the voice acting for Isabelle was carried out using a site known as Veed.io. It allowed me to type out dialogue for Isabelle and have an AI voice read it out which worked for what we needed.
The first cutscene is a very short opening of the game where Theodore wakes up as his wife Isabelle calls him down for breakfast and to get his son Timmy from the garden.
The second cutscene follows Theodore playing a quick game of football with his son in the garden where they are greeted by a familiar face to Theodore, Kage. This cutscene is much longer and showcases a great use of the timeline in Unity along with timeline markers which call signal emitters received by the the signal receiver component on the timeline allowing objects to be manipulated during certain parts of the cutscene. For example, Kage and his minions are disabled up until they are needed in the cutscene where a signal emitter is used to enable them along with the portal that they fall through. Timmy and Isabelle's models are also disabled once they are told to go inside by Theodore as they are no longer needed and seen again which again is done through another marker. This also serves as an optimisation as objects no longer rendered during runtime increases fps. These markers can be seen below where objects are enabled and disabled at different parts throughout the timeline. The two seen at the top in the image below are when minions 1 and 2 spawn.
Unity Timeline for Cutscene 2
Signal Emitter used during Cutscenes
Both cutscenes can be seen in full in the video below along with a short segment of running through the house to cutscene 2 which isn't complete yet but will be showcased in the final recording.
This concludes the second blog in this series. I will put out another one once cutscene 3 and the rest of the project is complete. Thanks for reading and I hope you stick around for the next one!
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