Absence note for UDK Session 7 (12/12/2012)

Unfortunately due to a sickness bug in the winter of 2012 I was unable to take part in this session. I did turn up to college, but I was unable to stay for long as I still felt very weak and therefore I left before the session started.

I hope that I will be able to go back and complete any work set for this day, but until then I just felt it was only fair to write in my blog why the work was not put online.

ExPlay (6/12/2012)

For the first ExPlay I have been to it was a rather interesting event to say the least. Put into groups we had to create a board game using the three words given: Brandy, Snow and Laser.

The group I was in came up with numerous ideas including a race to the finish line type game and a defence game similar to 'Plants VS Zombies'. Finally we came up with the idea of traveling up a hill or mountain of some sort in which the player has to avoid being attacked by the evil snowmen. On their way up the player is able to pick up cards in order to get advantages and Brandy in order to power up the laser guns used by the neighborhood children who you play as.

The experience of making a board game in very little time was challenging and stressful at times, but overall a lot of fun and well worth the mad dash considering how good the finished product looked, despite my roughly drawn buildings.

I ended up taking the role of leader naturally as I am not one to say yes to things I don't like or disagree with. And whereas this can be a bad thing at times it helped to keep the game in production and stop it from becoming over complicated with new ideas being thrown in at the last minute. I felt by the end I had struck a good balance between being assertive and being a good team mate as I made sure to often check the others' work and tell them that they were doing well. Even throwing in things that they could do in order to make everyone feel as if they were doing their bit as it were. I also made sure to listen to their ideas and ask others for their own opinions. Having a break also proved useful as it allowed us to refresh our minds and continue.

Overall I feel that going to this event was a good thing as it allowed everyone experience in making a creative and fun board game with a limited amount of time and restricted the ideas they had. This event also gave me the opportunity to take on a kind of leadership role which is great as not only do I want to go into management within the industry, but I feel that my group communicated well and we were able to produce a finished product in the hour and a half/forty minutes we had.

In the end I couldn't have asked for a better team as everyone worked well together and came up with some wonderful ideas for the finished product.

UDK Session 6 (5/12/2012)

In this session we were shown how to add features to our environments such as ladders, jump pads and teleports.

See below:

• Created a flat plane and a tower for my environment before creating a small tower next to the original in order to create a ladder. To add the tower I right clicked on ‘Add Volume’ and selected ‘LadderVolume’. Then it was just the case of rebuilding my paths by selecting ‘Build Paths’ in order to allow the ladder to be used. Now whenever I play this scene I will be able to walk into the side of the tower that I added the ladder to and be able to climb it.  
• To create a jump pad I had to go into ‘View’, ‘Browser Windows’ and then ‘Content Browser’. Once there I then selected ‘Actor Classes’, scrolled down to ‘Navigation’ and selected ‘UTJumpPad’ in order to add my jump pad to the scene. Once in the scene I then right clicked a space and went into ‘AddActor’ followed by ‘Add PathNode’ in order to add where the jump pad would send me. I then had to right click my jump pad and select ‘UTJumpPad Properties…”, here I then had to select ‘Jump Target’ and write in the box next to it ‘PathNode_0’ in order to select the first destination I had made.
• Going onto ‘Navigation’ again I scrolled down to ‘Teleporter’ before selecting ‘UTTeleporter’ and dragging it into the scene twice so as to make two points that connect to one another and thus send the player back and forth through them. Similar to the jump pad I then had to connect not one, but both teleports by doing the following. Right clicking one teleport I selected ‘UTTeleporter Properties…” I then went into ‘Teleporter’ and in the ‘URL’ put in the opposite teleports ‘Tag’ which you can find under ‘Object’. You then do the same for the other teleport and it should do the trick.