Completed Racing Level: Nuketown Caverns

The racing level was completed a little while ago, and what better way to show it off that with some screenshots. 

 

More of these screenshots can be seen in the "Portfolio" section. 

Overall it was pretty fun building this level, of course there was a multitude of issues I encountered along the way, but at least the end result worked out. One of the issues I had was with the fences (of all things). Initially, I created a Blueprint in Unreal that would aid me in creating fences everywhere on the map. There didn't appear to be any issues... until I built lighting. For some reason or another, The game (or rather the editor) would lag whenever Lighting was built. 

At the time, I didn't know it was the because of the fences, so I began to delete out groups of objects at a time in order to find the cause. After discovering it was the fences, I had to quickly resolve the problem by manually placing Static meshes of the fence around the level (Alpha was due the next day). In the end, it worked out. And thus I can feel proud of my level.

Sophomore Spinout 2015 Attract Trailer

Attract Trailer Research

With the Beta level done, next up is creating an attract trailer. As such, we've been asked to research and find a good example of an attract trailer and post about it here.

For this post, I'll be talking about Mario Kart Arcade GP DX

I think this trailer is great because it shows you the aspects of game play while it features that cars and the tracks. It comes off as informative, and I like that about this trailer. While the levels are since in the background, the trailer describes various aspects of game play such as unique functions you can do, or how it promotes the racers. So I would like something similar for my level, I want to show off the level as the player would see it from their point of view.

Vehicle HUD

The next stage for us is now creating the HUD for our vehicles. A such we had to do research. I looked into several speedometers and decided to go with this kinda style:

For the Tachometer (which I didn't know what it was) I went with something a little like this:

The tachometer wood be placed behind the speedometer and would not be as prominent. According to what I found, the speedometer was usually the most prominent.

For the Lap times, I wanted a more old fashioned style. Similar to the center of this:

As for the health bar, I wanted a kinda tube-like meter that drops when you take damage, something like this:

For this gear indicator, I wanted a more command-style feel, so when you clicked a button something happens. The way I want it, it would also serve as a tutorial on how to use the vehicle as well.

Particles: Smoke Ring

Here is my smoke ring particle for my Programming class. The smoke particle emits from several of the houses that appear in my level. Anyways, here's a video of it.

Particles: Research for Smoke clouds

We've started particles in programming class and we will now be creating a particle for our racing levels. So I was trying to think about what kind of particle to do and was coming up blank, so I watched a few tutorial videos for UDK and Unreal 4 and deciding to do a smoke related particle. Next I had to figure out what would make my particle unique, so I did a little searching over the internet and found these:

I was thinking of applying these rings of smoke into my level, and I thought it'd be cool to have the houses in it to be emitting a smoke particle every so often. So I started with learning how to do a smoke particle in Unreal using this tutorial (four parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GmlIfTsRaQ

And thus I made this:

Next is figuring out how to delay the smoke rings, and of course making the ring part. I was thinking of using a mesh emitter for the ring and have a texture over it. And create something similar to this:

But with a more "cloudy" effect.

I will probably also have it as a dark grey texture.