Industry Briefs : Troy

Through a thorough check of my artefact I found very few issues as every bit of code ran smoothly when playtesting. Throughout this whole process of creating the artefact I believe I have stuck to my initial proposal, creating a quest system that has the objective of the quest displayed and the quest being present in a quest log. With it having an ease of accessibility. The only faults that I have seemed to find is that with the quest log, once the quest has been completed and it has transitioned onto the completed quests column, I struggled with finding a way to remove it from the initial column, therefore it appears in both. Another area that I have deemed to be an issue is that there is no information regarding that you have to press Q to open up the quest log, making it difficult for a player to understand how to do so.

Finally it came time to create the video of my artefact. I decided against using unreal to video it as due to my artefact not being a physical thing, instead being part of the UI, I didn’t find the use of a change in camera angles to be worthwhile. Instead I opted to use OBS, which allowed me to take an easy video of me demonstrating my artefact, afterwards adding text throughout to explain what was going on.

It was now time for me to continue with creating my actual mechanic, deciding to have the quest triggered when the player would interact with a trigger box.

Coding it so that once the character interacts with the trigger box, firstly a prompt will appear on screen saying that the quest has begun and been added to the quest log. As well as code that actually makes the quest appear on the quest log,
‘raidthecityshow’ represents a separate bit of code, basically where the text is hidden in the quest log and is only made visible once it has been triggered. The code is referenced below.

This is how the quest would appear in the quest log.
I now had to repeat this process where another trigger box would trigger the end of the quest.

For reference this is what the trigger box looks like within my environment. The second trigger box has the same code as the first, including the code to change its visibility as once it has been triggered the quest will move to the completed section of the quest log.
My next steps will be to finalize my project, double checking for any bugs and fixing anything that doesn’t work. After that comes recording the video of the artefact running smoothly.

Due to me having a topdowncharcter template, meaning it was a point and click to move, I had come to realize that when attempting to playtest my mechanic and attempting move I couldn’t. After a while of researching I finally deducted that I had to implement this –
Adding this to the level and increasing it to fill the environment fixed the issue.
I then decided to alter the surrounding landscape.
Going into the landscape editor I used the tools provided to reshape and resize the surrounding area, while not adding a great deal to the overall project  I thought it necessary to not have the environment flat and basic, with the hills acting as a natural border as well.
Next came implementing collisions, as at the moment the player can just walk through the walls and towers.

Clicking on the assets image opens up this so we can add collisions the object, making sure to switch the collision complexity as use complex collision as simple. This now allows for the character to collide with the walls, rather than phase straight through them.

Next I am going to continue with my quest log mechanic, implementing a quest triggered by trigger boxes and having it appear in the log.

Starting in unreal I used the tools provided to create a simple blockout based on the city layout that I had previously made in Photoshop.

This is a second variation of the blockout I created in Unreal, as you can see there is a clear entry point to the city/castle, with towers and walls to go with. I also added some cubes in place of buildings, using the colour green to highlight which buildings have significance, whether that may be for certain quests or other things. I also colour coded the towers as red to indicate that they are hostile buildings. The only issue being if there is someone who is red green colour blind they would not be able to see the difference.
Now that the blockout and environment was complete I could get started with creating the quest system.

I started by creating a widget that would be my quest log, in which quests would appear to the player. I used an old dirtied paper as the backing for the quest log, trying to keep to the time period of when Troy was rumored to have been.

To implement the quest log in the game I created a series of code that would make it able to have the quest log appear when binded to any key. In this case I made it so if you pressed Q it would appear on screen. I did this with the help of a YouTube tutorial, the video is below.

I then proceeded to add a ‘back’ button onto the quest log to that you would have the ability to close it once you are finished checking the quests you have available. With the code removing the widget from parent, meaning it is removed from the screen.

Next my plan was to sort out the character movement, implement proper collisions of the environment as well as create and shape a proper landscape.

To start of my project I first wanted to research briefly into the history and mythology surrounding Troy, as well as analyzing Creative Assembly and their Total War franchise, trying to understand the mechanics of the games.

History – Mythology

Located in what is now called Turkey is famous and mainly known for the great Trojan War that took place at an estimated time of 1300-1100 BCE.
The most common tale that is talked about often is the story of the Trojan Horse, in which the Greeks offered Troy a gift in the form of a large wooden horse. As the gift was accepted and the horse was brought inside the city walls, Greek soldiers who were placed inside the horse burst out and sacked the city, winning the Trojan War for the Greeks. However, the history of Troy is often up for speculation due to its time period being thousands of years ago. Meaning that there are limited sources of information to look upon when studying this period. With any actual sources being hard to prove whether it is fact or a myth to add to the Greek mythology.
The main source of information comes from a legendary ancient Greek author, Homer, the author of both Iliad and Odyssey. In Iliad it is portrayed that the Trojan War began as a result of the abduction of a Spartan Queen, Helen by the son of Troy’s King, Paris. What followed was the abducted Queen’s brother-in-law, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, raised his Greek armies and sieged Troy. The siege was to take 10 years before the Trojan Horse ended the conflict.
Iliad is supposed to be set in the 10th and final year of the Greeks siege of Troy, claiming that the long, drawn-out war had drained the sieging army, as well as those within the walls with the war effectively becoming a stalemate.

Over the 10-year period of the war, numerous key events were recorded in various forms of literature. One of these key events being a duel between the Prince Paris and Menelaus, the King of Sparta and husband of the captured Queen Helen. It was said that the duel was to decide who would win Helen, therefore ending the war. Yet it was said that before the duel could proclaim a winner, the ‘gods’ intervened and prevented this from happening. Again, as mentioned before this is entirely up for speculation. With another duel taking place between a Trojan warrior, Hektor, as he is no match for a Greek warrior, runs three laps around Troy before he is caught and inevitably killed.

History – Factual

The exact location of Troy is undetermined, as the entire history of Troy has very little proof and is heavily influenced by mythology, archaeologists have struggled to determine what may have been residue of the city of Troy. From what had been identified, finding houses that had been build and destroyed numerous times. Usually by fire or an earthquake. The walls of Troy were found to be made of cut limestone that were to around 15ft thick at the base, rising to 17ft high, the walls of which had multiple ramparts and watchtowers. The city was destroyed by multiple earthquakes but the quickly rebuilt, almost every house was provided with between 1-7 huge storage jars that were buried deep into the ground. As well as the houses were built close together, there were determined to be special measures made so that the city could withstand a siege.

I proceeded to create a proposal of what I am going to create, which can be viewed on this link.

Industry Briefs Proposal

Now knowing what my project was going to be I proceeded to open photoshop in order to create a city layout, which would come to be a key asset in my environment.

The grey squares indicate the towers, light pink indicating walls and the light grey rectangles representing entrances.

My next steps would be to start in Unreal Engine, creating a block out and beginning to create my quest mechanic.