Audio process

My audio was done in multiple ways.

some sounds were recorded myself with a microphone, and some were found on the net and edited in audacity, altohuh at some point during the process every sound went through audacity and was converted to a WAV file so UDK could find it.

eac sound had to be link to a trigger in Kismet and given a soundcue much like the texture materials.

UDK progress screens

this screencap is of the level being blocked out and my doors/megaphone being in place, this was the first stage, getting the landscape to the right scale in comparison to the player.

this next one is much later down the line, all of the assets have been put in place and the textures are all placed/alligned correctly.

here the lighting has been added, i wanted to make it dark that the scenery was intimidating but not too dark that you couldnt see anything.

at this point most of the triggers were placed apart from the death/restart triggers.

the spikes are in place and textured, i personally feel that the blood spatters work very well here.

getting so many in place was a matter of copy/pasting until the desired amount was reached.

a top donw shcematic of the level itself, most of the triggers were yet to be placed here, but you can see clearly the shape and size of the environment fully.

an angled view of the three doors, as you can see there is no visible diference between them other than the sgns on the front, and there is no visual clue which is the correct door and which two lead to death.

all three doors are set to animate like this, complete with sound.

the doors also have collision meshes that move along with them, so that passing through them isnt a problem.

each door has a hole behind it like this one, there is again, no visual clue whether the hole is the correct or wrong choice, its all a guess combined with how the player takes the audio hints.

each hole/gap in the terrain is done with the CSG remove tool.

this is the final room where the level comes to an end, i made sure there was a clear light in place to make the text as clear as possible.

Final banner

here is the image that greets you when you make the correct decision, you walk down a corridoor accompanied by music to the podium where the level ends.

i wanted to make the sign look worn, as if its taken years and years for someone to finally find it, hence the crumpled paper look, alongside the black and bold writing.

i needed to make sure the action key was clearly made visible, as you need to hit the action key near the podium to activate the trigger which ends the level.

creating Pit textures

i wanted to make sure the spike pit looked intimidating, in the form of more than just spikes, the idea is that this is an area used many times before, so naturally the spikes would have been there before, and others would have fallen into them, so they floors and walls (to a degree) had to be bloodstained.

here is the bloodied version of the texture, a simple wood plank overlayed with a bloodstain pattern.

and here is the texture regularly, i mix and match both the bloodstained and clean textures within udk to make it look more believable.

Creating the models

the models i wanted to get done first were the three doors, i wanted to keep them as low poly as possible to make sure i had zero issues in the engine as i didnt plan on normal mapping them and to see to see if i could do as much as possible in simple photoshop texturing, i went through the standard process of modelling each piece of the door separately, UV'ing them separately, then bringing them together at the end to export them as an FBX for UDK.

The other two doors were made the exact same way, just with differing textures on the signs on the front of each of them.

Next i turned my attention to making the spikes, my plan form the getgo was to simply make one and then paste it numerous times to fill the surrounding pit with them, i wanted to make it much longer than wide, and make sure the head of it had something vicious about it in the form of more than just the one middle point.

when it came to texturing, this was the first time i had ever attempted a Cylindrical map, so i was very curious as to how it would turn out, i seemed to understand it quick enough, however im unsure whether it would be just as simple had it been more of a perfect cylinder, instead of being slightly reduced in subdivs to save on polys.

for texturing the head i wanted to make it look worn and dirty, hence the scratchy surface, thiswas achieved by laying over a layer of scratches on top of a clean metal texture.

i then turned my attention to the megaphone, i made this simply by taking a cylinder and shifting the subdivs i made with edgeloops, again the subdiv level of the initial cylinder was lowered to make it less poly intensive.

UV'ing proved difficult as the cylindrical map did not work as it did for the spear pole, i solved this by uv'ing one corner at a time with planar maps.

texturing was once again done by overlaying a low opacity layer of scratches over a metal look, hue was then changed to make it look slightly used.

next thing to model was the podium that sits at the end of the level, i wanted to give it a slightly regal look without making it look too fancy, i wanted to make sure the gold coin sat atop the podium on a velvet surface,  but make sure the rest looked expensive but not over the top, so i made sure the rest was simply a stone look to make it look cheap in construction.

the last thing i had to model was the prize at the end, a simple gold coin/medallion, this proved very simple, and had an easy gold texture overlayed.

First sketches

here is my first sketch of my levels layout, i wanted to keep it roughly based on a sumo ring, with an inner circle the competitors must stay in at all costs, and to help add to the 'extreme' aspect i wanted to achieve i wanted there to be a visible consequence to stepping out out of the circle, i went witht he idea of using spears/spikes which the player will fall in and die, they are represented by the crosses outside the circle.

there is a clear indicator in the middle of the wall and the 3 doors which will all represent either rock/paper/scissors, the player will choose which door they want to pick, two resulting in failure, and one resulting in victory.

the black dots on the outside represent either a crowd of bystanders, or simply empty space i will shade dark to give an added feeling of intimidation and isolation to the player.

My idea

i have decided to base my idea on a mixture of rock paper scissors and wacky extreme japanese game shows.

as basic as rock paper scissors might seem, that is not the main driving force behind my idea, that is merely the decision making side of things, im going to base the game in a setting almost like a Vietnamese prison, with a fence around the outside, muddy floor and pits of spikes etc.

the extreme gameshow side of things will be influencing the announcer the most, i will make a loudpseaker atop a pole of his voice to be played over, and he will speak the narrative which will get affected by the choices you make.

in order to actually make the decisions, i will create 3 old worn looking doors all having their own picture on the front of it, symbolising rock paper scissors etc, and you will active your choice by some sort of trigger ill place on them.

i will be making the whole thing in 3d, using udk for the scenery and my own assets from maya for eveything else, i wont be sculting any great detail in Zbrush as i feel i dont have time for that, i will just texture everything within photoshop.

i will make it the 'extreme rock paper scissors world championships'.