Blog 12: 1/15-1/21
This week, after finishing my level analysis and plans for my level based on The Long Dark: Wintermute, I began setting up for creating my metrics gym and level.
Initially, I was planning on using a horror-inspired asset pack for the main mechanics of my level, but after testing it out I realized that it didn't completely fit the style of The Long Dark. After looking into more packs, I found a pack created for story-based games with an interaction and inventory management system that was much more similar to The Long Dark.
After importing the pack to UE 5.4, along with a pack including animations for a bear, I got to work on tweaking the packs to fit my game better. Since I struggled quite a bit working around the existing Blueprints in my Borderlands project, I wanted to get an early start on implementing additional mechanics into this level. The first things I tweaked were removing the jump mechanic from the pack, since The Long Dark has no jump mechanic, and adding in a simple crouch.
A unique aspect of The Long Dark's aesthetic design is that although the player character is the height of a normal game character (about 1.8 meters), the large scale of most environmental objects, combined with the lack of jumping and an unusually low crouch, makes the player feel very small. I tweaked the height of the crouch to be a bit lower than felt comfortable.
The height I settled on was a crouch height of 1.1 m:
I also added basic UI to show the player's health bars. Ideally, since the player begins the level after a full night of rest, and much of the level takes place indoors, most of the more survival-heavy features like temperature and exhaustion wouldn't have much of an effect on the experience. Initially, I planned to add in the ability to equip items that have been picked up during the level, but for the same reasons--equipping items shouldn't have much of an effect on the overall player experience in this scenario--I decided to focus on making the actual gameplay feel as close as I could to the game.
Finally, I began working on the bear mechanics. Initially, I was planning to find a pack with built-in enemy patrol mechanics, but since bears and other large predators have a somewhat unique movement style in The Long Dark, I ended up starting from scratch. I found a tutorial for implementing a patrol feature and began connecting it to the bear pack I created. Currently, the bear is able to patrol along a prescribed path; next, I plan to add line-of-sight in a limited radius around the bear, so that if the player gets too close it begins to hunt. Since every melee encounter with a bear in The Long Dark ends with a loss for the player, I don't have to worry about incorporating combat mechanics.
I also created a blank level and began recreating the look of The Long Dark. I tend to emphasize aesthetic in my levels, and I wanted to get some of the legwork on lighting and colors done before starting the main blockout so that I wouldn't get as lost in those details once I was ready to actually build the level. One piece of good feedback I got on my last level was that the Landscape tool wasn't necessarily the best tool for creating spaces that the player would actually move through; for this level, I plan to block out large shapes with the Landscape tool and then use static meshes to create the actual landscape over it.
I increased the fog and the brightness of the sun, then toned the environment and the lighting slightly blue.
Next, I plan to finish the main mechanics and create the metrics gym level. The last large mechanics I have to implement are to use the existing interaction mechanics to create puzzles; once all of the mechanics are complete, I look forward to creating the metrics gym to show them off.
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