BOEHJ Pre-Alpha - A brief summary
For a Final solo project on my university course I wanted to learn all about what goes into making a fighting game from preproduction to a working demo. In 'Battle of the Elements: Hostile Justice', you play an elementalist who's sole purpose is to ensure that the balance of nature is as it should be - even if it means fighting fire with fire.
I learned so much in doing this project, and it became my baby more or less. I wish I had more time to fix some glaringly obvious issues within the actual gameplay itself and the interface; but for a 6(ish) month project with no prior knowledge on how to use Unreal Engine, I can't say I'm not chuffed with my progress!
In the end, the game could be played with an xbox 360 controller as well as keyboard and mouse.
Campfire level (Daytime fog)
Elemelon level (Sunset)
To keep the polycount low, I used alpha planes for foliage elements instead of modelling them. It also helped tie in the graphical style of the game altogether.
I separated the Elementalist UV's into 4 UDIM sets: Head, body, arms and legs. I then hand-painted a variety of clothing items, alpha masks for the parts I wanted coloured, and outlines so that I could layer them in material networks within Unreal Engine.
BOEHJ Pre-Alpha: Animations.
I'm not much of an animator! So, I created a simple rig that even I'd be able to manipulate. The campfire was animated using a variety of blendshapes.
Pre-Alpha for Battle of the Elements: Hostile Justice.
0:20 - Customisations
1:10 - Elemelon level and character functions.
1:40 - enem(y)entalist (basic AI)
2:00 - Campfire (basic AI) and burning to death