This week, I had more discussions with the other team members. I noticed that some members in our team seemed not familiar with the use of the game engine, and I myself have a lot of experience in this area. So I took on the task of building the white box for the levels. I will later build a white box for a level, so that our mechanism design and environmental art can proceed based on this, as well as testing the mechanisms and gameplay.
Similarly, we also discussed which engine we should use to develop the game. Our options were Unity and UE5. Both of these engines have their own advantages and disadvantages. Since we were assigned to develop a project using Unity in the first semester, we are more familiar with Unity and have a lower learning cost.
However, the drawback is that it is not easy to create the atmosphere of a dream in the current project theme and based on our personal abilities with UE5. The advanced graphics shaping system of UE5 enables us to create the artistic atmosphere and effects we want more easily, but we are not very familiar with the UE5 engine. We need more time to learn how to use it. After a series of discussions and trade-offs, we decided to still use the UE5 engine. We believe that the high performance of the graphics brought by the UE5 engine will make our game more beautiful and more in line with the “dream” theme of our project.
Based on my research on GDD, I have drawn some diagrams that might be useful.
Butterfly Book(Personal Painting)
Different forms of Cutty (individual paintings)
Since there weren’t many items related to the game’s storyline provided in the GDD, I drew the “Butterfly Book” based on my own ideas, and also created several variations by referring to the existing “Cutty” settings in the GDD.
The purpose of creating these items is to enable them to serve the storyline within the game. For instance, “Butterfly Book” can serve as an independent storyline. The butterfly symbolises fragility, transformation, and the unstable feeling of dreams., and “Butterfly Effect” represents the fact that this memory hasn’t been recalled for a long time. Later, this item can be used as the theme for solving puzzles or interact with other objects, such as switches and mechanisms.
However, I didn’t create too much because our resources, technical capabilities, and time might not be sufficient to build too many narrative structures and similar puzzles within the game.
These are all the items that I plan to provide to the other members of the team for reference. These items can be given a unique story, and in our project, they can be incorporated as interactive NPCs.
Reflection
This week has made me realize that as a world designer, my responsibility lies not only in proposing visual ideas, but also in evaluating whether these ideas can support the gameplay and whether the team can actually implement them. The discussions about engine selection and object design have helped me understand more clearly the close connection between technical tools, production plans and creative directions.