Starting on the creation of my map.

Today was all about me trying to import my road texture into UE4 and apply it to the road i tried making which failed and succeeded at the same time. The bad part was that the engine and the PC crashed twice causing me to restart and that the texture applies to the object(road) in the different direction so when i create the road the texture applies side ways.The good one was that I managed to create the road its short for now but it will be longer and I was also able to ride on the road.

Today i was able to create the road, i somehow managed to make it a sprite, it was aactually accidental but i was really happy when it worked out, in the next lesson i will be fianlly able to start on making roads for the map, i will also look into making building 

I was able to resize the size of the road using photoshop and then importing it into ue4 however the texture lost a lot of quality, So i decided to resize it in ue4 and it worked out!! however i only figured that out at the end of the session. So now i can have a more accurate road while keeping the same quality 

in blue i have highlited the original texture i have made which was 4096x4096 i changed the x value from 1 to 0.5 and now its perfect. I was also trying to make the car bigger so it fits better on the road however whenever i resized it to bigger the collision did not match and half the wheels were inside the road (aannnnnnd the engine crashed will finish this off next lesson ) i also made a building!

Today i was able to create a layout for my game its a grid based layout that is pretty huge. I decided to create that so i have a rough shape of what i want my map to look like and i can just change it whenever i want to. I will have to create a separate texture for a junction so i can connect all the roads together and make the road/texture look nice.

I also created this little town and added textures onto the shapes i made so now they look like buildings. I've also added some trees a hydrant,mail box, bus stop. Now when i run the game its starting to look really nice and i like it so far! However judging at how big this map is i might have to make it smaller or it might take a little longer to fill it up than i expected.

I was generating ideas for what to put into my map and how i want it to look like i tried doing some visual work but unfortunatelly my engine crashed towards the end of the lesson and i did not save through the day, which meant i lost the work i was doing today which honestly wasn't much as i was mostly looking on the internet trying to learn more about creating maps and buildings and other assets. i found this one indie game thats a bit similar to what I want to make, here is a link to a gameplay video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RNSgbST3DM .

Monday, today i was looking into the spline tool as i realized that the grid system on the whole of the map will be a failure. I was able to create roads freely with the spline tool however i was not able to put my texture on it and make it look as i want it to. Toward the end of the lesson i realized that it might be because my road which i want to use as the texture isn't a static mesh but a sprite. hence why when i put it on it was not showing up properly  when i ran the game. I was also able to create a spline component, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJyWSzfwEk8 basically this as i wanted to try and see if i can make my roads that way, well it was then, i realized that my object isn't a static mesh, i tied it with different static meshes and it worked. Next session/or at home i will make my static mesh in 3ds max with the texture already on it and then try the spline tool again to see if i am able to create the road with the texture looking flawlessly.

Creating visual assets for my game.

Today I was able to create a road texture for my game.
i will write more later as i have ran out of time due to my computer being super slow

In order to make the road texture i started out with a asphalt texture i went with this one:

I created a new photoshop document 4096x4096 and filled the whole document with the asphalt texture. I started out with a small rectangle so the texture looks as high quality as possible then I started to duplicate the rectangles and eventually they covered up the whole document.

in order to create the yellow line i went onto google images just like previously i did with the asphalt texture and i looked for the image i liked the most i downloaded it, opened in photoshop cut out the yellow line and then pasted it into my main document. I then resized it and started to line it up on my asphalt

i chose this picture for the white line. the process is the same as for the yellow line so i wont explain it again.

Here is how my texture looks at this moment. as you can see its starting to look like a road now.

 I then go onto mess around with the exposure so the road looks lighter.

I then went ahead and added some texture onto the side of the road right where the white line is to make it look liked its a bit old/used in a sense.

The last thing i did was add those marks after someone broke hard on their brakes, in the previous version of my texture road this looked way better than this one look like now and I think i will get rid of it completely since i couldn't make it look the same as in the 1st version.

Actually i was able to make it look a a lot better. 

Here you can see how the final design looks like! 

Audio in my game.

The main audio in my game will be the car engine sounds. I also want to have audio when you're in the menu scrolling through the options. Since my game is an open world game I also thought about adding a radio system that will allow you to choose a certain radio station or just have it turned off. Furthermore i want to make it so when you get close to an AI car (not the one you will be racing with but the cars that will be on the street as obstacles.) it will blow its horn at you, the player will also be able to use the horn when pressing a certain button. Whenever you crash into something there will also be a sound played, when you pull the breaks.

Ambient sound = Background noise.

The ambient sound that i could use in my game would be; car engine noises, wind blows, radio music, level music,

Alert sound = Sounds that notify you of something

The alert sound that i could use in my game would be; checkpoint sound

U.I sound = User Interface sounds

The U.I sounds which i could use in my game would be the following, while scrolling through the menu and placing your mouse on one of the options/ selecting one a sound will be played.

example of a sound which i have made and used in my game. This sound will be used to indicate that a player has passed a checkpoint.
https://soundcloud.com/hi-im-bachis/checkpoint-sound-2-1

Example of a second sound in my game which I am using is the following; a level sound which will be played when the game is launched. I got it from the internet.

https://soundcloud.com/hi-im-bachis/realisticrender-musicday02

Practicing UE4

Today after Jez gave me and a couple of other students a good tutorial on UE4 i went into the advanced physics car template and messed around with it. I made the map slightly bigger and also added collision onto it. I was also able to change the camera of the car so now its slightly further and higher than it previously was.

In todays lesson i was able to expand on my tack also add a couple of ramps, one of them is really hard to land!

This lesson i was carrying on with my track, i was able to finish it. I also deleted the whole platform underneath it so now if you go off the track you will just foll off the game, So far i was not able to complete the track once duo to the car as whenever you dont land right from the ramp your car will end up spazzing out and foll off the track meaning you have to restart the game. In the future lessons i will look into creating a restart point after pressing a certain button.

Psychology behind colors

Find about the psychology behind these colors:

Red; Red is also a physical color. It energizing. The color red is the color of energy, passion and action

Positive:  Physical courage, strength, warmth, energy,
Negative: Defiance, aggression,

Blue:  Is an intellectual color. The color blue is the color of trust and responsibility
Positive: Intelligence, communication, trust, efficiency, duty, logic, coolness, reflection, calm.
Negative: Coldness, lack of emotion,


Yellow: is an emotional color. The color yellow is the color of the mind and the intellect
Positive: Optimism, confidence, self-esteem, extroversion, emotional strength, friendliness, creativity.  
Negative: Irrationality, fear, emotional fragility, depression, anxiety, suicide.




In my game i will use the following colors for:

Red: I will use the color red in my game to represent enemies, there will of course be a minimap in my game so when you're racing on the map you will be able to see your self in; blue and the enemies in red. Yellow will be used for displaying check points on the map. Im also thinking of joining blue and red together to represent the cops on the mini map. Blue will be used to display the player on the mini map.


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In today's lesson i was able to identify and learn what most popular colors mean and i was also able to decide how i will use them in my game. I also had a look around looking at some different car models, i tried to download them and put them into the engine to see how they work and if they have sound like the ones in real life, just so i could get some ideas about what i want to do. However i was not able to find any downloadable assets.

Website For My Game

My task was to look at web animations, i went onto the mafia 3 website as the game came out just recently to check out if they have some interesting animations/designs on their website. It wasn't anything special but they had something unlike other big name game websites.

I want my website to be the following: when someone goes on the link to it, the first thing they see will be a parallax effect (http://www.franckmaurin.com/blog/the-parallax-effect-with-jquery/) then you will scroll down and see what platforms my game will be available on and also the price, then there will be a trailer for my game below the available platforms. Furthermore a short writing about what My game is about and a couple of screenshots of it below the writing. Something really similar to this website: http://www.firewatchgame.com/
bellow i will show how i imagine my page

as you can see here is my loading screen which i wanted for my website. I done loads of research and was able to find a few of  those but this one caught my interest the most. Its a bit boring for now but as i get better at using html and css i will be able to make it better.

Street Fighter.

In todays lesson i had to replicate this; http://benjaminewhite.github.io/jquery-streetfighter-example/index.html . What it is is basically Ryu from Streetfighter doing his famous 'hadouken' move. At first i was struggling with recreating the animation however after i got home i was able to watch some tutorials and almost replicated the animation  perfectly, only difference is that it has a different font and that mine does not play music when you hold x.

this is how my animation looks like. Unfortunately i cannot find the original one to compare it.

Exploring the mechanics of my game

My game will be an illegal street racer i need to look for a place that will include a lot of roads and i also want to go for a urban type of theme style and i also want to include a lot of skyscrapers in my game. I have chosen a part of 'LA' and especially this one part.

This is something i want my map/game to look like, skyscrapers in the middle of the 'town' and then around it would be some sort of tall flats with loads of windows in them.  like on the left top side of the circle around. I'm planning to make a make map decent size, cannot be exact as I'm not too sure about the scale of it but i want it to include loads of roads you can drive on.

This picture is an excellent example of how i would like my streets to like in my game, I have circled all the objects that i want to utilize in my game. I really like all those trees on the pavements as i feel they add a lot of personality and color to the streets. The bins on the pavement gave me an idea of putting them into my game onto the pavements however when the player/AI collides with them they will not be able to knock it off the road but will instead crash with it. As for the lamp posts i want to make them so when the player collides with them they get destroyed, not literally but they get pushed over and fall to the floor without slowing the car that hits it. Guaranteed its at a fast pace else you wont be able to knock it off and instead something similar will happen like when you collide with the bin. This is basically what i want my streets to look like but i want mine a bit smaller than those ones, 2 roads for each side would be perfect.

Since my game will be an open world game i obviously have to think of stuff that the player will come across during free ride so i thought of adding in cops. I feel like adding cops to the game will make the free roam a lot more interesting and challenging because if they see you driving at a high speed you will attract their attention, I'm thinking of also adding cops when you're in a race and get caught, after the race ends and you still have a wanted level the chase will persist until you lose the heat. (I might add a system that will have 5 levels and the higher the level is the harder it will be for the player to lose the chase).

I am also planning on adding cars driving around so the roads aren't empty and they will also work as obstacles.

The cars that the player will be able to use I haven't thought of as of yet and also deciding on how many cars there will be. I think that if you copy how a car looks but name in differently you wont get copyright striked, so I'm thinking of just recreating some of the popular cars that would be good for a racing game.

As for what time i want to set my game i have decided that i want to do both night and day, so a 24h period. I have previously done something sun related so i have  a little of knowledge about it but I'll mostly do loads of research to get it spot on.

The controls for my game will be 'WSAD' . I decided to choose those over the arrow keys because i feel like its more comfortable to use 'WSAD' and mouse for camera control, unless you of course choose to have your camera locked then you don't have to worry about it. On the other hand most people will actually prefer to use a controller while playing a racing game which i prefer myself. However if the game does get released and it gains interest from people some of them might not have a controller but that's not a problem, i could just release 2 versions of the game for keyboard control and controller. 

After you cross the finish line a picture of your car will be taken, it will display how fast you completed the race and how much money you have earned. After clicking the 'Enter' key it will allow you to continue free roam from where you finished the race. However after you cross the finish line not in 1st place the game will be paused, a screen showing the times of the race will be displayed and you will have an option whether you want to retry the race or exit to free roam.

The plot of my game will be to defeat multiple bosses across the whole game to become the best. You will also get a shot at getting their car. Complete enough races and you will get challenged by the boss. After completing the main story you will become the most notorious illegal racer in California. After that there wont be much else to do apart from just free roaming.

For the race types in my game i want to go with a variety. I was thinking about making circuit races, sprints and time trials. I feel like circuit races are a basic thing for every racing game and I'm sure every racing game i have played has had a circuit race in it. Sprints are another type of a race that's included in most of racing games I've played, it basically requires the player to get from point A to point B while racing against other players (AI). Time trials is another race type i want to include in my game, it requires you to get from A to B in the shortest  time possible (there will be a set amount of time you have to finish the trial in e.g. 47 seconds if you fail to complete the race in given time you will be able to continue it until the finish line to see what your time was however you will not be successful and will have to retry the race but since you already completed the track your time will be displayed below the time you have in order to be successful so you can see and compare how you're doing each time and whether you need to upgrade your ride or just path smarter for better results.