Story Time

The Problem:

Up to this point in the development process, the Story element has been completely left out. When pitching the game I thought of a scenario and a backstory that would work and leave us with options of what we could do with the game. This week for the alpha build we would have to incorporate it into the game. This lead to the problem of where to tell the story, what to use to tell the story, and how to deliver this content to the player.  To some this might be easy to answer, and easy to implement, but for me I am not a storyteller or artist. This would be a problem that would take me all the time I had for the week.

The Solution:

The first question of where to tell the story was the easiest. Build and intro scene when the game loads up with the option to skip. After that came the design decisions of what to use as assets and how to use them to tell the story. The first thought was to do a cutscene with the character assets that we were using. After a day of working with the assets and the tools Unreal has for creating cinematics it was clear that the combination of the lack of training/experience and the amount of time I had ruled this option out. With not artist on the team using our character assets would look sloppy and would severely bring down the quality of the final product. It was at this point I made the decision to go with a comic book type system and use AI generated art to help cover the lack of an artist. The next several days were spent prompting different AI art generators to get images that would work together.  Getting different generators to produce like images was more of a task than I first imagined. Since I was not willing to buy credits I had to hop around and use what free credits each one gave daily. Once I had all the art it was back into Unreal to piece it into a story intro sequence. With time running out, I went with creating widgets for each "page" of the story. Once I had decided the images fit together and where, I created simple blend in animations, slide in animations to give it some variety.  I believe the final product was successful and can be used with minimal tweaking of some of the visuals, and wording to tell the story. I just hope that I can now make up the time it took to design this and get caught up on the development tasks that were neglected this week.