STUDENT PROJECT . COLLEGE FOR CREATIVE STUDIES
The Crystal Element was my senior year thesis project at the College for Creative Studies. I worked with three other students on a Total Conversion Mod for the game Unreal 2: The Awakening. The four of us took a futuristic first person shooter and re-worked it into a fantasy third person adventure game. Our game was included in the January 2005 edition of Computer Gaming World.
SCRIPTING:
Most of my duties on the project involved getting the Unreal engine to work with the content that my team members were creating. The first challenge was implementing the third person camera system, this allowed us to see the Space Marine character running around the in-game environments. Eventually I imported one of our own environments in as a separate level. Next I swapped out the default main character for the one that my team had created and then finally attached our own unique character animations and weapon sets into the game. Additionally I tweaked certain game values such as running speed, jump height and player health to better suit the genre of game we were making.
AI:
Using the Unreal Engine tools I was able to create several AI "types" for the different characters in our game. There were the traditional NPC's that we used to populate the starting village. Unreal 2 included tools for character dialog as well as scripted in-game events, so we were able to have a character guarding the exit to the village until the player had completed a specific quest.
We included several ambient creatures in our levels including birds, lizards and fish. Additionally we had an imp creature that was the main base enemy that would hunt down and fight our hero. I was able to create a few imps who simply patrolled the levels waiting for the player, as well as some who reacted to scripted events and would ambush the player at specific times.
