NAVIGATION
GAME OVERVIEW
LEVEL DESIGN
SCRIPTING
MISCELLANEOUS
This session contains information about my contributions in terms of various tasks. It encompasses my work stitching assets along with the artists and other fellow designers, as well as my internationalization tasks.
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Asset Stitching
As we moved towards the final milestones, level designers joined artists to help with the stitching process in order to deliver levels with higher performance and better visuals, especially in terms of lighting. As Unreal Engine 4‘s Lighting technology creates artifacts – weird shadows – on the adjacent sides of the tillable assets, part of the level’s Aesthetics pass was to take groups of tiles that built walls, ceilings and other wide surfaces, and stitch them together – process explained later. However, our team had only a few artists who could not finish their art tasks and stitch the levels. Therefore, they taught us, level designers, the process and we collaborated on the stitching tasks. As part of that, I stitched meshes for levels 2 and 7.
In a nutshell, stitching meshes constitutes of taking all the tillable static meshes that compose a wider surface and merge them together to make a unique asset. This prevents it from generating any lighting artifacts and reduces the amount of draw-calls to the GPU. Although the process is relatively simple, it is very important to be aware of the assets collision. As known, Unreal Engine 4 detects collision during the importing process, by checking for an extra model following the name convention UCX_ModelName. However, as we stitched the surfaces, we mostly used big boxes for collision meshes, even when these surfaces had some sort of hole (for a fiedable surface, for example). That generated another bug for a while, where we could not understand why shooting specific fieldable surfaces would not work. Later we realized those surface collision was blocking the raycast, and then, we went back to them and remade their collision volumes.
TRANSLATING TO PORTUGUESE
As part of Gravitas’ last milestone, I was responsible for translating the whole game to Portuguese, my primary language. That work encompassed every dialogue line, Curator’s and SHI’s, menus and even the main lobby’s display texts.
Scripting
Game Overview