MA Games Design Diary

Creating the 'Interact' and 'Take' Pop-Ups + the Door Locked Notification First, I created the designs in Adobe Illustrator before exporting them as PNGs to Photoshop and Procreate to add a paper texture effect.  Initially, I wanted to create a worn effect to the designs, with tears and rips; however, I decided against this as the added detail did not work well at a small scale.  Once I had finished the 'interact' and 'take' designs, I brought them into UE5 and added them to my existing HUD widget, aligning them centrally below the crosshair. I then replaced the existing design within my 'need key' widget with my new design.  Creating 'Key Found' and 'All Loot Found' Notifications I first drew the decorative frame on my iPad using Procreate and then imported the design to Adobe Illustrator to vectorize it, scale it, and add text.  Using Photoshop, I then imported my designs and applied a gold foil texture to the decorative frame a...

This week, I created 11 icon designs of loot items, such as tinned foods and weapons, to use within Unreal Engine as part of UI pop-ups when the player collects items.  I first collected examples of Western illustrations to use as inspiration when creating my icon designs. At first, I wanted to create detailed icons in the style of Western engravings, such as the example below; however, I decided to use a more simplified engraving illustration style, as I believe a detailed style with thin strokes wouldn't work well at a small scale in my HUD.  Illustrating in Procreate  I took screenshots of the 11 loot items within Unreal Engine, both lit and unlit, to use as references. I then imported the screenshots into Procreate on my iPad and began to illustrate the icons using the Deep Cuts brush pack from Retro Supply to achieve a traditional engraving style using digital tools. I made sure to leave gaps when colouring to replicate the lines cut into engraving plates during t...

Creating Exterior Sound Effects I used a YouTube tutorial by ACDev to help me create a muffled sound effect.  I first sourced a sound effect from Artlist and added it to my level in Unreal Engine, setting 'Overrid e Attenuation' to true in the level editor, and modifying the 'Inner Radius' and 'Falloff Distance' values to make the sound cover the whole saloon. I then added an 'Audio Volume' to my level to cover the interior of the saloon. When the player is within this volume, the sound effect will be muffled, creating the effect that the sound is coming from outside the saloon.  In the level editor, with the 'Audio Volume' selected, I changed the 'Exterior Volume' to 0.7 and created my sound effect into a sound cue. I then created a sound class called 'Environment' and went to the 'Master' sound cue to group my 'Environment' sound class. With the 'Environment' node selected, I set 'Apply Ambient Vol...