Payton Grady
Clean Up Crew: Birthday bash
Platforms: PC
Made in Unreal Engine 4
Play Time: 10-15 minutes
7 Developers: Jesse Allion, Cade Boden, Noah Craddock, Andrew Ellner, Payton Grady, Evan Thaler, and Leo Zhu
This project was a small-scale and short-term project for High Point University’s senior capstone. While it is still a work in progress, this project was intended as the culmination of the skills we had learned in class. My responsibilities included audio design, character design, animation, general programming, and level design.
Audio Design
I Created blueprints within the level that would play these noises. The team opted for a more animated tone. While my work did not make it to the current version of the game, I still understand the core responsibilities of audio design.
Character Design
While I was not the creator of these two Mudbox-developed characters, I assisted in the exportation and implementation of these files into the appropriate blueprint format in UE4. After this, I rigged the characters, creating animation blueprints and blend spaces for idle/walk/jump/fall cycles, attack animations, death animations, and emote animations.
Animation
I created a wide variety of animations for the Hamster protagonist including walk, run, fall, melee attack, heavy melee attack, and a variety of emotes connected to the F key which included dancing, waving, and stretching. To develop a consistent animation cycle that works with the game’s physics and collision boxes, I had to create blend spaces that, through the use of codes and commands such as “is NOT true”, locked the individual animations into activating at specific times. On the subject of timing, I also had to ensure that the animations began and ended at certain times in order to maintain a sense of realism.
General Programming and Level Design
As a programmer, I took on miscellaneous tasks that were integral to the functionality of the project. One of my first responsibilities was to program the movement of the “trash” collectibles to the vacuum cleaner. This was a particularly challenging task because I had to coordinate several “lerp” (linear interpolation) blueprints together, which included different sets of x, y, and z coordinates to create a sense of movement that is clear to the player.
A much simpler responsibility was the “switch character” program. This involved me binding key commands through Level Settings, and then developing a command in the level blueprint to allow the thirdpersoncharacter mesh to switch from the Vacuum character to the Hamster character. This was challenging for several reasons: our team operated via Github, in which we used individual branches to upload our work to the team leader. By working on the main map, I had to effectively coordinate the workflow between me, the leader, and other classmates to ensure that this blueprint would be implemented correctly without causing file conflicts.
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