With my 2D work completed, it was time to start developing games using 3D in the form of the Unreal Development Kit (or UDK). We were given a list of popular film titles and while working in pairs, we were asked to utilise them as inspiration for a complete 3D level.
Now there were many options to choose from; Zombie Land, Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings are a few that I can remember, but there were a few things to consider that made the level design harder that it first appeared:
The game-play had to be of your own design and could not just rely on the mechanics of the engine.
UDK has close ties to Unreal 3, which is a multiplayer bot/human combat game featuring game types such as deathmatch, Capture the Flag etc. The level we were to hand in could not be a bot filled deathmatch level or a CTF level, it had to be a completely new design.
The look and feel of the level had to match the title chosen by each team.
Now UDK is an industrial themed, post-apocalyptic combat game and the included assets reflect that. This means that to make objects in your level match the theme inspired by your design, you have to either create/find new models/textures or re-purpose the existing ones and hope no-one can tell. I’ll tell you now, there are no tea cups within UDK!
You must make either one complete level or two smaller levels
So that in mind, we decided to make two large levels >.<
Below is a game trailer style video of our completed coursework. Matt and I had actually finished this a few months ago now but it’s taken me a little bit of time to properly complete the film.
As UDK level files are huge (and we made our levels huge also), offering the game up for download isn’t really an option so hopefully this video will give you a taste of the finished product. Enjoy ^^
As you might’ve guessed from the title, we decided to opt for Alice in Wonderland theme. An excerpt of our brief reads:
Alice has fallen asleep within the maze, outside her home and as she snoozes, her thoughts and memories drift away over the hedges. When she awakes, she has no memory of who she is and must seek out the pages of her diary which now litter the strange world now surrounding her.
Credits:
Ben Candlin
Matt Preston
hey this looks amazing! my name is Jeremy im in a level design class but my instructor is not very helpful. trying to find help guides has been tough i was curious how to you get the gun to go away and do you know how to make a timer show at the top center of the screen? your alice in wonderland game looks great.
Thankyou
When we produced this we were pretty much left to our own devices also but we were provided with an awesome collection of video tutorials which are accessible from the same site you downloaded UDK from.
Go here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html and scroll down to the section titled : 3D Buzz Video Tutorials – Using UDK.
As for the gun removal and your timer I suggest you watch all the kismet related videos (kismet is used to script actions within your level).
Very briefly though, this tutorial : http://wn.com/udk_remove_hud_and_weapons_tutorial shows a method of weapon removal. A word of caution though, removing the HUD (also within that link) disables text out to the screen, so for our own design to work we had to endure the HUD being there. Apparently it can be removed by modifying the internal textures but that was out of scope for our project.
Hope this helps