This week we're going to take you inside the Breeze! The Breeze as it is now has only existed for 2 years. It was purchased and massively renovated by its mysterious and wealthy owner M. The hotel is strange, and that perhaps reflects the whims of it's eccentric owner. The building is small, having only 3 rooms available for guests, and those rooms magically change every single day. Luckily the hotel has a beautiful café/restaurant attached, which draws in the tourists and locals all year round. Made almost entirely of glass, it's one of the hotel's most striking features. concept art that our magical artist Grace turns into something beautiful This week we have updates from the team, so I'll hand you over! SamI've been working on improving the dialogue system which will help us keep our code organised and will shorten the time required to implement all dialogue and decisions. Along with this we've been implementing and making changes to a plugin which allowed text to be animated to move and change colour, this will be really useful to show feelings and emotions of the characters dialogue and we hope will improve the players overall experience! It's a big task for me to do this as there are aspects of UE4 which are used I'm not very familiar with such as using macros and functions, but it is by understanding these I can streamline the process for dialogue implementation. Another issue I'm facing is integrating the plugin code to fit what we currently have, it's good to have this challenge though as it'll improve my knowledge immensely! GraceThis week has revolved around the iterative process of refining the existing assets. Everything I make begins life in the modelling software: Maya. We are working to quite tight budgets, so I need to make sure that every object conveys its purpose at a glance. It can be hard finding that balance, but I do enjoy a challenge. Once modelled and UV unwrapped, I paint the textures by hand in Photoshop. It’s a longer process than other workflows I've used but I thoroughly enjoy it and try to integrate hand painting into most of my projects Once the texture sheets are painted, I import the assets into a test version of the game in Unreal Engine and give them a once over*. Once happy I send them on their way to be placed into the proper version of the game. *Once over can be anything from 10 – 100 texture sheet changes. Depending on my mood. I hope you enjoyed this insight from the team! Next time we'll get you more updates, and a character spotlight!
See you soon, and stay safe. - Chey
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Heya everyone! This week we’ve been working on a bunch of new stuff! Grace has been adding to our décor and taking charge on some new social media! She’ll soon be posting on our Instagram and has set up a Facebook page you can follow here! https://www.facebook.com/breezeinngame/ We’ve found a great new tool to help us implement dialogue! Sam’s been figuring that out and hopefully you’ll be seeing some of that very soon! I’ve been working on our sprites! I’ve never worked with the paper 2D stuff in unreal before but it’s looking to be straightforward. I’m having a lot of fun revisiting my old work and giving the characters an HD touch up! I’m trying to stay true to their heights this time too hehe. I’m also working on replacing our whitebox UI, I’m excited to see it looking pretty! Last week I promised you a character introduction, so here it is! Our first and maybe most adorable character- Zip! You’ll have seen them all over our social media- that’s because Zip is the manager at The Breeze. They zoom around all day keeping everything running! Zip will be your guide and companion throughout your time at our little hotel. Character Spotlight!
You can check out a short comic strip featuring Zip here:
https://breezeinngame.tumblr.com/post/620100529113186304/ Next time alongside a longer update, we’re gonna take you on a tour of the lobby! Thanks for reading! Stay safe and we’ll see you soon! ~Chey The Breeze Inn started as a personal project for me. My main interest when it comes to games, and in general, is characters! Strong characters can endear me to anything. I wanted to make a game where the characters are the focus, a game that needs you to be a good judge of character. Like a puzzle game where the characters are the puzzle, and that's the core of The Breeze Inn. The game is simple! It just takes a little bit of intuition! My passion is in creating interesting characters, with diverse backgrounds and appearances. I hope to do a good job of creating characters representative of many backgrounds. As a queer person I made the decision that the majority of characters would be LGBTQ+. It’s important that these characters get the chance to exist and live treated like people, and in stories that don’t revolve around their genders and sexualities. Also just because I feel like it. Please be patient with us, as we learn, and contact me if you spot that we’ve made a mistake! Our team is creating The Breeze Inn as our Master’s Degree project! We’ve worked hard to get the basic mechanics working, and we’re passionate about finishing and releasing this game very soon! We’ve been busy rebuilding the game from the ground up in Unreal Engine4. This week is the start of our very last semester, and production on The Breeze now begins in earnest. Already we’ve set to work on implementing the first set of dialogues. Sam has been clearing up my messy code and researching streamlining procedures. Our talented 3D Artist Grace has been giving the existing models a polish, adding a touch of flair! And I’ve been planning and drawing up character sprites.
We’re so excited to start sharing the game with you! Please follow us on our social media to stay up to date, and we’ll let you know when the next blog arrives! We’ll also be showing behind the scenes content and sharing a little of the world of The Breeze Inn. Next time alongside the update, you’ll get to meet a very important character! See you soon! ~ Chey. |
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