This week, I had a lot on my plate — I devoted almost all of my time to this project. Trying out Blueprints and building the game was incredibly exciting for me, and along the way I encountered many challenges.
Here’s what I worked on this week:
1. Created the blueprint for the enemy zombies
2.Repaint the texture
In my last discussion with Serra, she suggested that I try modifying the model textures myself. Assets like the gun and the arm are way too common and a lot of people use them, so I’m planning to redraw the textures myself. Also, I noticed that the zombie and skeleton materials aren’t very high quality, so I redrew those too and tested them in Unreal Engine.
When I was painting the zombie textures, I wanted them to look more gruesome and fleshy. Although it’s not exactly bright, positive, or uplifting, it fits the overall game background.
In this game, the goddess and heroes sealed the Serpent but couldn’t kill it. Many years passed, and both the goddess and heroes disappeared without a trace. Some nobles discovered that the Serpent’s blood could cause mutations, and even had powers like resurrection and life extension. So, they built a dungeon near ancient ruins to conduct experiments. These zombies and skeletons are the tragic results of those experiments.
Skeleton texture – white and black:
Gun:
When I was painting the gun and arm skins, I actually really enjoyed it. As a player myself, I love buying skins in games, so having the chance to create them this time was exciting. I wanted to make the skins a bit more stylized and fun. Since the overall tone of the game isn’t very bright or lighthearted, I wanted the main character to look a bit more positive.
Arm:
When I was painting the arm, I added some paint-like graffiti, a fabric texture for the glove, and visible veins on the arm.
3. Build environment
Assets I used:
1.Dark fantasy greatsword pack：
2. Morbid Pack：
Morbid Pack Volume 1 – https://www.fab.com/listings/8b88ac2e-9b50-4381-91d1-46683a89178b
My process of building environment:
I tried for a long time to create volumetric lighting to achieve the Tyndall beam effect, but I wasn’t successful. So I had to make a fake light beam myself:
I added cube models, stretched them, then duplicated and rotated them six times to form the light beam model.
I used two texture assets from UE5’s built-in engine content pack to create a light beam.
The effect I get:
Create packed level actor
During the asset setup stage, I followed this tutorial and learned a really useful method called “Create Packed Level Actor.” It’s a great way to combine many different assets—it can regroup various assets into one big, rich new asset and pack it into the level, so it can be moved around freely.
The “Group” function in UE is really hard to use, because when rotating or moving, the pivot points of the parts need to be manually re-aligned. Otherwise, after rotation, their positions will shift and break the original composition.
I used this method to build almost all the complex assets in the game, such as staircases, the knight statue hall, some complex combined statues, tables, and the platform where the serpent is placed.
However, this method also has some downsides. When I try to place an actor inside a packed level actor, sometimes it stops working. Also, when complex actors are nested together, modifying them can cause some models to disappear. If I go into the original level where the model was made, all the parts are still there—but when I drag the actor into a new level, some of them are missing.
This cost me a lot of time when making the knight statue hall. I nested individual knight statues with a full row of statues and added blueprint components for the torches. The problem was, when I tried to modify the actor at the second level, going back to the first level wouldn’t save my changes—so I ended up losing the parts I just modified.
Also, in this setup, the blueprint components for the torches couldn’t display correctly. So what I did was place the torches separately instead.
When building the stairs, I also used the “Create Packed Level Actor” function. I created a stair module, so I can combine them to form multiple staircases.
When I first started building, I honestly didn’t know where to begin. The assets were like thin sheets of paper, so I had to manually align and connect the stair sections. Since there were gaps between the bottom of the assets and the stairs, I had to use single-sided walls to close those openings.
However, because these assets are quite modular and open-ended, there are many possibilities when it comes to rebuilding and reshaping the staircases.
Used plugin: Dash
I use Dash to help me better organize assets. It makes the assets more visual. Although you can also use filters in folders, Dash feels a bit more convenient.
It also lets me use physics simulation brushes to scatter objects on the ground, and vine brushes to create vines on walls. But these tools can be a bit tricky to use.