About the Game
What Makes a Hero? is a third-person racing game aimed for a mature audience.
In What Makes a Hero? The player must navigate a flooded meadow and save civilians before time runs out, whilst utilising their powers along the way.
The player can fly, use super speed and deploy a protective bubble around characters in order to deliver them to a safety raft within the time limit.
This was my final project for submission for my university.
Dynamic Flight System
This project stemmed from my love of superheroes and was a passion project of mine. I wanted to give the player the feeling of having superpowers and give them the sense of doing good in the world.
I programmed everything in this prototype, with some assets (House, Raft, Bed, Lamp) and animations (Flight Animations) being taken from Sketchfab and credited accordingly.
Mechanics wise, the flying was the most important part to get right, as the user experience was at the top of my mind. The implementation included the usage of vectors, functions and local and normal variables. Each axis had to be created for each direction the player wanted to fly in.
There is a timer present within the game, which is constantly counting down. The player can increase their time by successfully delivering civilians to the life raft, which will in turn fill up the progress bar more.
Costume
I created a Metahuman and textured the outfit within Substance Painter, utilising many outfit references for a final design fitted with a cape and subsequent cloth physics. I drew influences from the Scottish Flag, as that is the nationality of the protagonist, Suzie. I wanted the outfit to have a homemade feel to it, present with the mixture of sportswear material and white fabric around the accents of the suit. The sportswear material was placed where the most amount of movement was realistically needed.
UI
The UI, whilst minimal, was necessary in displaying two core pieces of information to the player, their stamina and the amount of time they have left. This was done by multiple progress bars, as well as a stamina system I implemented to restrain the player's movement.
During playtesting this was a feature that was evidently needed, as there was an over reliance on utilising the Super Speed over flight due to its ability to cover greater distances in a shorter time.
As for it's design, the entire prototype housed a comic book like aesthetic, so I wanted to maintain this visual style by utilising half-tone brushes when designing the UI.
Post Process Volume
As mentioned above, the project contained a comic book adjacent aesthetic. This was created with a fully modular Cel-Shaded Post Process Volume I implemented. Throughout my time at university my curiosity with tech art and visual filters grew immensely. I grew the confidence throughout each unit to push this skill as far as I could.
This culminated into this project, where the aforementioned Cel-Shaded filter came into play. Such settings as Line Thickness, Colour and Fresnel Power were included to make the most out of this material. Implementing these settings helped fine tune the visual style of the prototype to my overall vision, enhancing the experience substantially.
LOD Pickers
Since I utilised a Metahuman as a replacement for the Unreal Engine mannequin, I realised very quickly the project needed to be optimised in order for it to run well.
Because of this I used LOD Pickers for all of the foliage within the project. I used Tree It to create the low poly foliage models used throughout the environment, to ensure performance was running smoothly.
What I Learned
This project taught me the importance of Optimisation. Using features such as LOD Pickers and Texture Resolution Scaling reinforced how vital optimisation is when developing a game. Comparing the overall performance and load times of the project before and after optimisation made me realise how big of a difference it made.
