Douglas Hamilton - Unreal dev kit




This short, single player puzzle platformer was a small side project to fully familiarize myself with the new features in Kismet and Matinee from the latest release of UDK. I decided before starting it that I wouldn't do any art work for the environments as it would only detract from my main learning focus, so instead i just used flat colours and let the lighting do the details. Most meshes are stock UDK assets except where i needed more specific things to the game. Game play it is a case of progressing to the next room, while solving puzzles to get keys to open the door to progress. Each room is isolated into smaller puzzle elements so there is no back tracking through levels to open doors or access areas previously inaccessible. Since it was just for a learning experience i wanted to keep things simple, so the design reflects this and doesn't have the depth that something like a Zelda dongeon would have. To the right you can see a short play through of the beginning parts of the levels

Everything you see in the play through is done completely with kismet and matinee, and since it was purely for learning I decided to add as many varied puzzles as possible to use different methods of achieving things. The first room is a large chain of matinee sequences linked with compare bools to tell the train cart where to go depending on what levers had been pulled, all leading to the final "destroy the door" sequence. The water puzzle on the other hand is a far more simple affair. Just pull the lever to raise or lower the water, and the environment design does the rest of the work for the puzzle by raising or lowering blocks floating in the water and blocking off or bridging sections to guide the player.
		The floor pressure pad puzzle is similar in design to the train cart puzzle. Trigger touches on each floor panel each with a compare bool to make sure the previous one in the sequence had been pressed. if not the puzzle resets and you have to start at the beginning. Other puzzles such as the water bridge puzzle rely mostly on environment design. triggering something that plays a matinee sequence that allows you to progress. In this example, raising blocks out of the water allowing you to jump across each stone and reach the key on the other side before the time runs out.



Adventure game is a heavy work in progress so that I can learn Unreal Script as well as other such advanced features with learning UDK. It is a top down adventure / collector game where your goal is to complete quests for NPC's and along the way collect materials to help improve the village. Examples are to clear out a mine of all hostiles so that miners from your village have access to the ores within the mines, thus allowing you access to higher tier weapons. Finding rare plants in the world so that you can bring to the botanical gardens for cultivation, and eventually allowing better potions from the potion shop. Or rescuing non hostile animals from the world and returning them to your farm to earn the benefits they can give.