UDK session 4 (21/11/2012)

Wanting to create an atmospheric first person game similar to 'Amnesia: The Dark Decent'. I used the scene with the descending hole from last week and instead of making it descend into an abandoned bunker as I originally planned to make it descend into a jungle temple of some sort. Therefore I made sure to include plenty of trees within the environment and an Aztec temple in the background in order to visually tell the player this. I also decided that instead of just starting the player by the hole, as I planned originally, I chose to have them travel through a claustrophobic cave. Therefore, when they reach the mouth of the cave they have the sight of the hole, trees and the temple to greet them, thus giving the player a visual pay off. I decided to create the temple as a per-built one did not exist in UDK. Afterwards I added the flaming skull heads at the top which were available on UDK for added atmosphere. I made sure the hole had plenty of platforms for the player to jump down onto as, if the player fell down the hole every time and survived then this would be unrealistic. In this way the player would have the experience of exploring together with a sense of accomplishment from finding the way down safely. However, until I find out how to make the player character die from falling it seems unlikely that I will be able to accomplish this design choice. 

When I finally got round to texturing parts of my scene I found that I had forgotten what I had originally searched under in order to find the particular texture I liked. Fortunately, my lecturer told me that by using Alt and right click I could select a texture on a surface I had already used and then apply that same texture onto another surface, thus avoiding searching for the same texture over and over again.

Below you can see the stages I went through in order to create this environment and some game play images.