Neural Override
During our 4th Game Project at Futuregames as one of the Game Designers. We as a group of 8 people made our game in Unreal Engine for the four weeks we had known as Neural Override.
Gameplay Clips Down Below:
A 3D First Person Stealth Game.
In Neural Override your goal as the player is to stealthily sneak by the enemies patrolling the dark city skyscapes without being caught by the guards.
You as the player are not alone as you have an Installed AI that takes over yourself from time to time, either by helping you in situations or sabotaging you.
Are you able to get to your destination or will you get captured by the enemies guarding the place?
A Game Without Game Artists.
For this game Project each team got 100 euros to buy assets from the Unreal Marketplace to use or edit for our games since we wouldn’t have any game artists in this project at all.
My Contributions to this project:
Lead Quality Assurance
UI / UX Designer
VFX Artist
Generalist Designer
Lead Quality Assurance.
As the Lead Quality Assurance of this game project of Team 06 Dragonfruit. My main role was to make sure that our game was playable without any game breaking bugs or problems that could occur when submitting the latest build of the game, which I made sure to playtest to make sure everything new that was added is working as intended.
My Work Process:
When It comes to playtesting I often starts with the Idea of me being able to play the game from start to finish, since that’s the goal of the game.
If I find any bugs or problems… Let’s say: “A collision is missing on this wall or If I use a block here, I can skip the whole game.” I will try to find what is the cause of the problem and see If I am able to reproduce that bug the next time I play the game.
If I can, I will try to record my screen otherwise take screenshots and write valuable information both in Jira but also in our Groups Bug Channel in Discord that we use to report any bugs we find.
It helps a lot for the other programmers and designers based on what bug was found. Since I think time is valuable and short when you only have so much time to actually work on a project with a deadline. So the better I am able to explain how a bug was found, the better It is for the team.
UI / UX Designer.
As the UI / UX Designer, I was in charge of making most of everything that is based on the UI / UX of our game.
My work Process:
With a background of being a Game Artist, I am able to make my own assets which also saves both money and editing problems, which was a good thing since we were able to use that money on other things for our game.
In the beginning we had one Idea to make the player be able to see what the AI would be doing on the screen once the player had found something worthwhile for the AI to be interested in. - For that we needed a HUD UI whenever the AI would control the player and I also planned to make a Post Process screen effect added into It. - But for now It would just stop the player from moving Itself with the HUD basically saying “AI is now in control” However, we found that the HUD was blocking view for the gameplay which I had to change into something smaller.
Since we didn’t have time to add It, I started working on the Main Menu together with a Healthbar, Victory & Lose Screen. For the Main Menu, I just took a screenshot from our game in a more playable scene and added some effects in Photoshop to make It look better together with the title name and team name added.
Since our game would be somewhat futuristic with the guards and how the environment feels, I started working on the buttons design and found a free font we could use for our game. For the fonts I took a screenshot and posted It in the discord server to see which one the team liked the most.
Energy was basically our healthbars name at the time, before I changed It into the new green healthbar design.
VFX Artist.
As for the VFXs I didn’t have too much time to focus on adding effects onto the environment or character since I was working more on QA and UI / UX.
But I did have time to make one effect for the environment and character.
For the Environment I added a very simple Smoke pipe VFX since I found in our assets pack we used had a lot of pipes or textures that could use a bit of smoke to.
As for the character, I added a Eletrical Slash effect whenever the player would use their knife against an enemy. It showcases the hitbox a bit better which feels better aswell since the robots don’t bleed in our game.
I didn’t do the Knife Slash
Animation However!
<—- Weakpoint!
Generalist Designer.
As one of the Generalist Designers, I also got to do some work besides my main two roles for this project.
My work process of the Enemy Material.
Based on the fact that we bought assets we could use and/or change for 100 euros. One of the characters we used in our game is known as Paragon Wraith from the Unreal Marketplace Store. We liked the model, but the original one looked a bit too sci-fi for its materials, so I changed the materials inside of It to make It look better!
So the Idea I had in mind when changing the character from its base dark gray color scheme… was to make It look cooler! I wanted to think more based on the color theory and what would fit a guard that looks kind of like a robot soldier. Because the environment would be rather dark most of the time, I wanted the guard to be evil looking but also be visible in the darkness to the player.
So the main color I added into the materials was a dark black color while having some neon light from their body glowing in the darkness based on a more red / pink color. I think this model of the guards looks more intimidating against the player!
One last thing I wanted to add into the material was the fact that you could crit or deal much more damage to the enemy if you attacked them from behind! So I added a yellow / orange glow to their back which I wanted to showcase to the player that “this is their weak point!”
I hope It worked as intended!