Dream Factory Development - 001

I'm already a few months into the development of 'The Dream Factory' a third person platformer I'm creating with my friend Conrad Stone. not sure if I will go into detail about the lore and story but will mainly be creating posts to document the development process and how the game is coming together.

We started with initial mood board's but we have found it a bit easier to just start making a level to get used to the tools in unreal engine 5 before we can start implementing specific ideas for the environment.

Dream Factory - Level 01 Mood Board

Conrad then started getting together character models using 'VRoid Studios' App and creating a few different pieces of music to be played as ambient background music for the first level which would have been a more chill and in the classic Studio Ghibli style. I set up the first level using the sculpt tools in unreal to create a giant valley in the middle of the map, with emphasis on the height as the aim would be to get to the top, or at least somewhere near the top. I then created a big waterfall going from the top to the bottom with the help from a content pack from the FAB marketplace called 'Aeon Stylized' which had pre-made water, foliage, rock assets I could use. I took a random building model from FAB and played with the textures a bit and took this screenshot.

Dream Factory Dev - Environment Test 001

I then started working on adding a sprint to the character which you couldn't really notice so I did a bit more research and found a movement pack made by Epic Games called 'GASP' which helped out immensely with the character animations and also added some footstep audio at the same time. There was also a climbing mechanic which was in the pack but didn't transfer over to my project, I was able to add it back into my project with a bit of tweaking though.

This allowed me to focus more on art direction and creating the spawn point/first obstacles the player would encounter. Before entering this level the player would select the level from a hub world similar to Dark Souls 3/Super Mario 3D. They would spawn in a dark part of a cave and would have to make their way out into the bright, sunny and vibrant part of the map filled with lively wildlife and colourful fauna. The direction of the cave has taken a few iterations and I have taken a few screenshots throughout development but not as much as I would have liked.

Dream Factory - Cave Dev 001

After getting a base of what the first part of the level would play out and felt comfortable continuing I set it a side for a while to focus on some lighting. The cave wasn't as dark as id liked and I also needed something to light specific areas of the cave, mainly to show the player what the right direction to take was. In most games they use a yellow or a bright colour to indicate where to climb/go. I felt if I just added a yellow bar or something on ledges it might take away a bit from the emersion so I went into Niagra and created a simple particle simulation, to simulate fire flies and added them to certain spots throughout the course of the level.

Here is a short video I made including one of the music tracks Conrad made to give a feel of what it might look/feel like playing the game.

Dream Factory - Cave Dev 001 (Video)

Dream Factory - Cave Dev 002