Overview
Designed and developed for my final year project at Staffordshire University, Under the Veil is a stealth game prototype built in Unreal Engine 4. The intention behind the project was to explore the various design techniques employed in the stealth genre.
Over the course of development, I was able to learn much about various areas of game design with work on AI behaviour, character controls and movement design, flow design and level design.
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Design and build a system in UE4 Blueprints to handle AI perception under certain lighting conditions using Inverse Square law to calculate player light level
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Design and build a dynamic movement system that allows players to vault, climb and slide when approaching objects with specific rules
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Design and use the behaviour tree and the environmental query system to build an AI that will detect the player and investigate the player's last seen location
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Employ various techniques to make the demo visually-appealing
I learned a lot by taking on this project. There is much I would have improved had I had the knowledge I have today. Some examples would be:
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Redesign the level featured in the demo to better complement the designed systems, and downsize the level to provide a more understandable and better flowing experience for players
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Focused on building passive gameplay without actually affording incentives to the player for sneaking around guards. Solutions to this could include being able to distract guards and being able to pickpocket guards for useful items