So I was working on a puzzle for Ionia where I wanted to draw the player’s attention to the other side of the room where a door would only be unlocked if they pressed 3 seperate buttons. I thought we could use an effective visual cue like Portal but aesthetically match Ionia’s environment.

That's when I fondly remembered the "breadcrumbs" mechanic from the Dead Space series.

The UE4 content examples for splines had a very similar particle effect, and working with splines sounded very exciting. At Blue Void Studios we want to keep players immersed and are aiming to make a game without control-snatching cutscenes.

What is a spline?

A spline is at least two vector points in 3D space connected by a line.

The shape of the spline can be controlled by adding more points and choosing different point types:

Curve

Linear

Why spline components?

• Fun and efficient to work with
• Pretty intuitive controls if you've used splines before in other 3D tools or used the pen tool in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
• Creates smooth paths and curves or linear paths for meshes, game objects, or particles to follow
• Perfect for level building blueprints that will be used multiple times throughout development, such as fences, staircases or race track/road tools.

Dissecting examples

While trying to grasp how to use splines in UE4, I searched for some resources around the web and dissected Epic's UE4 content examples.

Two important Blueprint nodes

After dissecting spline blueprints in the content examples, it became clear that two blueprint nodes were very important to making most effects and tools:

• Get Spline Length - This node will get the target spline's length in Unreal units from beginning point to end point.

• Get Location at Distance Along Spline - This node will use a spline asset you assign. It will take the amount of length along your spline (float value) and produce a Vector 3D value. The output will be either a set of local coordinates or coordinates in the world (depending on which choice you make in the drop down menu).

Example 1.2 - Placing components along splines

When you get the location along the spline, you can measure out a section to evenly distribute points for objects to spawn along. You will need to measure the total length of the spline and then divide the length by the number of objects you want to spawn.

For example, if your spline was about 417~ Unreal units long and you wanted to spawn 13 pointy arrow meshes along the spline, you would divide 417 / 13.

When setting the location of the next object spawning with the results of your math loop, you can simply set Get Location at Distance Along Spline to Local instead of World. This way your numbers will work out using the actor's coordinates instead of the world's. The Get Actor Transform and Inverse Transform Location (from what I can deduce) is a legacy work around from previous versions that did not have the drop-down option to switch to Local for the Get Location at Distance Along Spline node.

Here's an example of World space vs. Local space. Local space is the distance of the actor's mesh or object from the origin of the actor (local origin = sphere in the Blueprint's viewport). World space is the distance of the object from the level's origin, aka the 0, 0, 0 coordinates on the map.

Example 1.3 - Using a spline as a path

This blueprint will take a ribbon emitter particle and update its location based on the spline's length and points along it within 3D space.

The particle effect animates using a looping Timeline with a linear interpolation - a "lerp" - from 0-1. Get the length of your spline, then multiply it by the interpolating values of your timeline. Use the location data of the result to plot in 3D space the location your ribbon emitter.

As the timeline plays, the location of the point along the spline will update, and so will the location of the particle ribbon emitter.

Resources from around the web

• Blueprint Spline Content Examples
• Blueprint Spline Component Property Reference
• Blueprint Spline Mesh Component Property Reference
• Zak Parish's training stream on how to use spline components to make a road asset.

Holy crap, you guys! We’re still in shock. After barely a week on Steam Greenlight, Ionia was Greenlit last night. We just want to take this opportunity to thank every single one of you who voted to get this game on Steam. We’d also like to thank our Kickstarter backers again for helping us get this far. We can’t wait to finish Ionia and bring you an exciting new game to play!

After the Unreal Engine 4 live stream where Epic showed off some videos from Koola, a UE4 developer on the official forums, I was very interested in creating a scene with that amount of visual prowess. See the original forum discussion here.

Here is a video of the final product of my research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzfezyBbrGQ

Basic Lighting

I started with the basics I had already known: Point Lights in strategic locations to simulate the bounce lighting I desire, a Dominant Directional Light outside with a Spotlight shining in to amplify and emulate the effect of sunlight, and also 2 Dynamic Lights near the bottom with a radius length that stretches along the glowing floor gutters. (I kind of miss the function in UDK were you could create lighting using emissive materials applied to meshes.)

Reflection Spheres and Cubes

Next, I added reflection spheres and a reflection cube while trying to follow the guidelines in the UE4 documentation.

Lightmap Resolution

The shadows on the left wall are less jagged after increasing their lightmap resolution from the default 32 x 32 to 256 x 256. (For the sake of taking great looking screenshots or recording flythroughs, changing the lightmap resolution to a greater value is of no consequence. However, in game it will start to affect performance and FPS.

Post Processing

Next, I added some post process effects. In the image below you can see I messed with color grading and added a Scene Color Look-up Table by following the process detailed in the official UE4 documentation.

Subtle Yet Strong

I took a moment to improve the materials of the glowing gutter from being a solid emissive shader to having some darker edges. This is a pretty subtle detail but I think this is just another example of how a good material and subtle details can improve a scene.

Messing with World Settings

Below is a comparison of the same scene with alterations in certain properties in the World Settings menu.

Indirect Lighting Quality

Indirect lighting quality = 2.0

Indirect lighting quality = 4.0

Indirect lighting quality = 10.0

From the documentation:

"Indirect lighting quality scales the sample counts used by the Lightmass GI solver. Higher settings result in fewer solver artifacts (noise, splotchiness) at much increased build times. Note that this will not affect artifacts due to using lightmaps (texture seams, compression artifacts, texel shapes)."

Perhaps these values would be obvious in a brighter scene?

Environmental Color

I added environmental color to brighten and warm the scene a bit. A bit subtle but did brighten the scene favorably.

Diffuse Boost

According to Unreal Engine’s documentation, to get the most out of diffuse boost you need to increase the number of indirect lighting bounces:

3 bounces, 2.0 diffuse boost

100 bounces, 6.0 diffuse boost

I scribbled “Max” on the screenshot below because the values that appear when using the editor’s arrow buttons reach its limit at that value. But you can see the previous image with bounces set to 100 has much lighter shadows.

4 bounces, 6.0 diffuse boost

Ambient Occlusion

Altering the values of Ambient Occlusion did not have much of an effect in such a dark scene. Also there were not high enough values for Ambient occlusion to be obvious..

From the docs:

Lightmass calculates detailed indirect shadows automatically, but it can be useful to exaggerate indirect shadows for artistic purposes or to enhance the perception of proximity in a scene.

Improving Materials

The ceiling looked very repetitive and had unsightly lightmaps. I had used multiple cubes to create the ceiling. I deleted them and used a long stretched cube as one piece and used a material I created that wouldn’t stretch. I used a World Position node but alternatively it looks like [there is a function available] to do the same thing using texture object nodes.

Breathing Life into the Scene

In an attempt to make the scene more alive I decided to add some dust sprite particles to the scene. The particles added movement to the sterile scene:

I also added a God ray:

Extra Oompf

Dynamic Lighting

To get the desired specular reflection along the length of the gutter lights on both sides, I changed the right Stationary Light to be a Movable light since I reached my limit of stationary lights. The limit is 4 while they have their shadows overlapping. Since it’s such a simple and small scene I wasn’t too worried of the performance cost of having just one dynamic light.

Caustics

I also decided to throw in some caustics using Light Functions to emphasize the fact there is water sitting in that upper edge. This also added a bit more movement to the scene:

Learning From Koola

Smoothness

I tried to follow Koola’s advice that I had read on the forums:

“…max bounce world lighting settings and decreased indirect lighting smoothness to 0.8.”

Smoothness at 0.8

Bounce Lighting

I was hesitant to use Koola’s plane technique – having a plane and a spotlight in front of it to amplify bounce lighting and color – since I didn’t want to incorporate any techniques that couldn’t be used in a playable level. But the option to hide the actor in-game and to set collision to “No Collision” frees the technique from any issues.

Altering INI Files

I felt safe messing with the BaseLightmass.ini file only because I made a separate UE4 project just for this lighting study experiment. Otherwise I wouldn’t have messed with any .ini files because of the risk of compromising or corrupting our game’s project files.

These are the settings that Koola set in his UE4 Project’s BaseLightmass.ini file

Learning More

Soon after I originally completed my study on Koola’s lighting techniques and style he had released a downloadable example room to the UE4 marketplace. This confirmed a lot of what I had discovered during my study. Check it out!

I learned quite a bit by messing with multiple settings in various option and property menus. I think one of the bigger things I took from this research was that shaders can very easily determine the quality of the scene in your game. Spend a good amount of effort in making a seamless, tilable, reusable shader that will impress and you will have a much better looking scene. I still have a long way to go but I feel like I leveled up my skills a bit. I hope my research notes inspire you to write about your game development learning experiences.

Before and after

We’re kicking off the new year with an exciting announcement: Ionia, formerly known as Blink, is on Steam Greenlight! We have also released the first public alpha gameplay trailer and a free music download.

Steam Greenlight

First off, we are elated to announce that Ionia, formerly known as Blink, is on Steam Greenlight. This is an exciting moment for us because, until now, we’ve only been communicating with our Kickstarter backers. Now we’re ready to spread the word beyond Kickstarter and we couldn’t be more excited about it. If you want to see Ionia on Steam, now is the time to let Valve know! Please use the link below to check out the campaign, and be sure to vote and spread the word!

Vote for Ionia on Steam Greenlight!

Alpha Gameplay Trailer

We released a short teaser trailer along with our Greenlight campaign that establishes the look and feel of Ionia, but some people have expressed interest in seeing more gameplay footage. So, we went ahead and released some pure gameplay footage over the weekend! This video should give a clearer picture of how the mechanics work and what to expect in terms of mood and pacing. Bear in mind that Ionia is currently in alpha.

Free Music

Like the music in the Greenlight teaser? You can download it for free! The music will play a central role in establishing the mood for Ionia. This should give you an idea of what to expect from Blumoon’s original soundtrack for the game.

More to Come

A very special thank you goes out to our Kickstarter backers for supporting us, and thanks to everyone is supporting us on Steam Greenlight. Keep an eye out for more updates in the near future!

Here's some concept art of a door. A good example of how my gray matter evolves an idea.

Here’s a few concept environmental art images for our redesign of the first area that the alpha consists of.

Cryo control room concept

Abyss bridge concept

Research hallway concept

Reactor control room concept

Elevator at the end of the office floor

Office room concept

As a small team (now even smaller due to financial constraints) Nick and I split the workload between us. This makes the workflow kind of odd.

To help deter a lot of misunderstandings we decided to make a lot more concept art than we were originally making. First steps we design- talk about an area, show each-other reference photos, and anything else that can get us to say “YEA EXACTLY!”. Then I draw what was discussed and creative alterations. I show the concept art and we discuss again how close the physical image is to his mental image. One more final art is drawn for modeling, including environmental art of where the object will be, top down, and side views of the object. Then Nick or I model the texture. with the reference images created in the previous step.

Hey everyone! I hope those of you who are celebrating right now are having a wonderful holiday. I know you’re probably wondering about what sort of progress we’ve made in the past month. We’ll be updating quite a bit next week when the new year kicks off, so please sit tight for another week.

In the mean time, Jessica has prepared a little holiday treat for you! You can grab it below in your resolution of choice. Happy holidays and best wishes from all of us at Blue Void Studios.

Fullscreen

Links temporarily removed

Widescreen

Links temporarily removed

Our sincerest thanks go out to all of you. We did it!! We’ll be sending out detailed updates later this week regarding the rewards, when to expect them, and how everything will go down from here on out. Nothing but love, guys!

We’ve been pretty elusive lately, haven’t we? Well, today we’re ready to crack the door open a little. Some of you might remember Blink, our entry for Global Game Jam back in January 2011. It even landed a front page feature on the Global Game Jam website back in April.

Today I am happy to announce that Blink is coming back in a big way! We’ve been working very hard on a demo that we’ll be submitting to the 2012 Independent Games Festival. Sadly, we can’t really afford to work on Blink full-time after the demo is finished and submitted. For that we’re turning to Kickstarter, the world’s most popular crowd funding website. Not familiar with Kickstarter or crowd funding in general? Visit their website to learn more.

We;re really humbled that Kickstarter approved our proposal, and we've prepared a list of awesome rewards that we think people will love. The campaign will go live next week.

There is a lot in store for Blink. Today we cracked the door open just a smidgen. All will be revealed next week when the door swings wide open.