Jumper. FP-Puzzle Game inspired by Portal

–Original Opening Post–

Hey guys,

So this game, I have been working on for quite some time now. I started off creating the game in Blender game engine and have since migrated to UE4. I am however still doing all asset creation in Blender.

I used this game to get familiar with UE4 before diving in to anything more complicated. Since its humble beginnings, it was designed to be as simple as possible. I wanted nice and clean level design while making the game feel refined and not like a typical indie game that is rough around the edges.

There is still lots to do. The loading/menu screens need properly going over. I need to create a whole load more stages. EDIT: Done

I would also like to make the level asset pack available so players can create and share custom stages.

If you would like to see the origonal WIP thread, you can find it here: 'Jumper'. Game inspired by Portal. Windows and Linux Demo Now Available! - Works in Progress and Game Demos - Blender Artists Community

All assets you see in the game are my own creation.

–UPDATES –

General:

Nearing end of production. Making a final push to create a decent amount of stages, finish creating remaining needed assets, and polishing over everything. It will then be a case of doing some final optimizations and then rebuilding all the lighting etc to production level before finally packaging. So around a month or two I hope!

Linux:

For those of you on Linux, a Linux release is in the pipeline. I’ve set up UE4 so that it can now package to Linux. Sadly this feature doesn’t currently support C++ projects. I’m going to try building the engine from source and trying again. Otherwise I may have to do a native build in Linux. Either way, I don’t want to promise anything this very moment. I’ll post updates on that.

Demo:

Windows only at this moment. Should run on both 32/64 bit.

If you are going to play the demo, please can you leave me some technical info afterwards:

  • Exact Windows version
  • RAM
  • CPU - Type and Power in GHZ
  • Graphics card
  • Other standard PC specs
  • Monitor size

The game has been packaged to preview quality, so the lighting isn’t perfect at the moment, and so this demo is not indicative of the final level of quality. There are some stages that still have elements blocked out with simple cubes awaiting to be replaced by new assets.

You may also notice some debug messages when starting a new stage. I’ve done this intentionally to make sure the auto save feature is working correctly. While on the subject, could you also make sure that the continue button on the main menu is working for you as you would expect it to. If not, how would you like it to behave differently?

If you have a controller, please try it out. I’ve tested XBox 360 controller which works fine. A = Jump. Start button will bring up menu. All other controls are your typical FPS movement controls. Menus not supporting controllers yet. Only the actual game itself.

Download Demo Now!

Preview Images and Video:


Stage 10

Combines both rotating and rising platforms.

Created a new PBR material for the ground/floor.

Used Blender to sculpt the high poly tiles, then ran it through Xnormal to create normal/occlusion maps.

I then created the diffuse map in Gimp.

Managed to find a decent concrete specular map which I was able to invert, tweak and then use as a roughness map.

Final tweaks in UE4 material editor.

That looks pretty fun, I always like games that have any hint of portal.

Thanks! :smiley: Glad you like the look of it. Watch this space!! :slight_smile:

So I’ve finally got around to making a start on the colour palette. I chose one out of a load of Sci-Fi photos I picked from google. I picked one that had lots of nice blues. I then opened it in Gimp and sampled a palette of different colours and tried to use to guide the colours in the game.

It’s mostly shades of blue, with some green lighting to compliment it.

It needs polishing, but I think I like how it’s going :slight_smile:
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Further tweaks to the colour palette.


In-game tried and tested with Xbox 360 controller and working as expected. So all normal controllers should you work.

So I’ve been continuing my efforts to get the materials right. There was a free PBR material pack available on the unreal market place so I downloaded that and finally got a nice material for the walls after a bit of tweaking. I essentially took the gold material the pack had and altered the diffuse to match my colour palette. I think I’ve finally hit the nail on the head. What do you think?


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Modelled some new SciFi stairs too.
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Latest video update:

Hey guys.

I’ve just started a package export of the game. I don’t know how long it will take, but hopefully by time I get home from work I will have a windows demo available. I’ll keep you updated :slight_smile:

Game looks like it is coming along nicely :slight_smile: I’m a huge fan of first person platformers and I can see a lot of potential here!

Some feedback…

Aesthetically, it looks nice. It still looks a little white-box for my liking, but I like the minimalist approach. I think there some materials that stand out as looking far too flat IMO though - as highlighted in this screenshot: http://prntscr.com/8sle31

I think if you made these maybe a dark reflective grey, or gave them some texture, or even just a darker shade of blue, it could look better. But I’m not sure. I’m not saying ti looks bad, as it definitely does not :slight_smile: Just offering some feedback.

As for the game itself, it feels (in the video) a little slow. That’s about the only thing I have to comment on other than I hope the puzzles get crazy hard and insane XD

Keep up the awesome work! Hope to play the demo soon :slight_smile:

Hey, thank you for the feedback!

It’s funny you should spot those exact materials, as those are the ones I’m still needing to update to decent materials as they are still basic ones :wink:

By slow, do you mean player speed or the speed of the moving platforms? If you mean the moving platforms, that’s intentional to make it a bit easier at the early stages of the game. Don’t you worry though, those will be going faster and faster as the game progresses. So yeah, the game will be getting harder and harder. With faster moving platforms, larger gaps and platforms that rotate and move up and down at the same time.

I’m not having much luck packaging the game :confused: It’s taking hours and hours and still not finishing. So I will wait until tonight and leave it to package over night.

Again, thanks for the feedback. Watch this space! :smiley:

I actually meant more the player speed seems a bit slow for my liking :stuck_out_tongue: But I can’t REALLY comment ont hat to omuch until playing it… So hurry up and get that **** thing packaged XD haha. I assumed the levels would get harder as they go so I’m glad that was the case haha.

ah I see, yeah I might edit that too.

Haha I’m trying! It’s just taking for EVER! :confused:

Oh yeah, they will start to get fairly brutal late game! It’s already becoming quite challenging to even test the stages I’m currently working on :smiley:

P.S I’ve updated the materials for those areas you pointed out. So they now have good quality PBR materials assigned to them :slight_smile:

Nice. I’ll expect my consultancy cheque in the mail XD

Yeah yeah, maybe you’ll get one the when this game finally pays me a cheque! :smiley:

Well, it looks like I’m going to die of old age before this game packages :confused: It’s already taken around 9 hours and it’s still not finished :confused: What a pain!

That’s weird… whenever I’ve packaged anything it’s pretty quick. Whats your PC specs?

Good news - I figured what the problem there was. I had downloaded and included a material pack from the market place. It had a LOT of textures. After I removed all un-used materials and textures from the project, the game started packaging within minutes. Hooray!! :smiley:

But…

Now I have another problem :frowning: The packaged game looks entirely different. All the reflections are really buggy. I have no idea why it’s doing that. Surely it would be exactly the same as playing in the editor?

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