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  • Writer's pictureAaron Thompson

The Path Blog 1

Updated: Jul 7, 2020

What is 'The Path'?

I began designing my final year project as a Game Design & Art student at Winchester School of Art, as a game that would help as tool to help someone understand what PTSD is like in the shoes of someone suffering but also a way to help someone who has PTSD understand the CBT method better, and also to help them understand that they’re not alone.

The Path follows a character after a crash, in which they were knocked off the road and it implies off of a bridge, by the wind in a storm. With certain triggers in the game regarding this plus musical cues. The Path really is about learning and understanding that what a person goes through with PTSD isn't taboo and actually more people experience it than you imagine and not necessarily in the way everyone thinks. The key points to CBT are exposure and not allowing yourself to suppress or avoid emotions and scenarios. The Path shows this.


March 4th: This is the beginning of my own path, so to speak.

Below are the milestones in which I aim to stick to. I have an extension on my actual deadline, which is helpful but I hope to stick to this time frame.



March 5th: The start of this journey begins with the asset and development stages I decided to play with different styles for low-poly look that I am going for, some variations of a tree stump you can see of differing poly counts.




I decided that something closer to this last image would be better for the feel of my game. Luckily not too many assets are needed to create the environment, some foliage variations mostly. Most of these tests were made in 3DSMax from basic shapes and then altered using simple modelling techniques like chamfer, extrude and then soft select polygon/vertex moving.

Some tree variations I made are below, I quickly discovered that for an oak tree in this simplistic style, I can use the trunk as a branch and the larger canopy as lower leaves. I can do this within my game engine of choice also, Unreal Engine 4.


You can see the extensions used to get the desired effect of the trees.

I also designed some rocks in a similar way.


March 9th:

I have began looking at grass and foliage within UE4 within it's terrain painter, they are too high detail and poly count for the look in which I want to go for. I have decided to take an older grass model in which I designed for a previous project and see if I can lower the poly count on them.

If I can also alter the models themselves to look more stylised for how I want to make the game.

The original models are as shown below.



March 12th: I have managed to develop a Cel-shade material that I hope to use in my game, also shown are the blueprint trees which show how the material works.




What you see here is a lot of masks, parameters and math nodes that all add up to make the depth in which the black outlines sit and the height in which they are offset from the object. You can see it in play in comparison to the other cubes in the scene, in the above picture.


I also developed a dynamic waterline system. This means by using post process materials I was able to make a split water line view. By making an overall blueprint and then plugging in the components, (these being a two basic colours and an alpha that looks like waves) it will overlay the camera view with the depth and filter when the player enters that area. The next step would then be to create a wave system.


March 19th: After some time away from the project to get another assignment done, a lot has taken place in the world. A virus has broken out and has been declared a pandemic, a lot is up in the air for the world currently.

However, we must carry on own our "Path".

I have created the actual Path model for the game, I took an original concept design that I made for my first semester when designing the game and created it similarly from that, as shown below.


I also created a logo for all the social media pages when they are up and running!



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