Hi there :smile:, peeps. @beadyeyes and I made a silly little game about a child's quest to become the best fish battler that ever lived! This was my first time in Unreal as well as my first time doing anything art or design-related for a game jam! it was a lot of fun and We would really love to hear your feedback and for you guys to check it out if you guys have some time! (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/a-fish-based-game)

In our silly game "A Fish-Based Game" we tried to make it so we could generate a giant variety of fish

We do this in three ways with the first being the fish behavior system!

This system had 3 different fish triggers that activated based on certain conditions these were: idle, get hurt, tap on the glass, and lastly a proximity one that went unused. Then we had 5 different actions with randomized values that generated actions these were: panic, swim away from fish, swim towards fish, move in direction, and stop(which we cut from the final game)

it was all made in unreal blueprints by @beadyeyes and this system was then also used to create the boss fishes that you fight in the game! it was great to not only have a system that generated fish for our game as well as breed it but the system was quite easy to use! In another timeline perhaps there would only be custom-designed fish in the pool!

These two fishes are used by the cheater Sarah and are meant to swim in a circle around the arena chasing each other!

And here are their behaviours!

Next time I'll be posting about the other two systems that made our fishes more unique the blendshapes on and the gradient mapping! as well as some resources for others to learn them! since I was an artist/designer on this I didn't get too much hands-on experience with the code for the behaviours!

with those next two systems, the possibilities of fish really are endless!

Hey there here is an art breakdown on how we made some of our art in our silly little game it's the last week so we would love your feedback! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/a-fish-based-game

In our last post for the game jam, we broke down how we made each fish have its individual behaviours. However, I said I would do a post for each additional feature that made our fish more unique, which was the blend shapes and gradient mapping. However, I ended up getting quite busy and never posted that so here it is now!

Here are some of the blend shapes responsible for the different fish shapes in the game most of them are based on some kind of fish like guppies, goldfish, eels, and a few variants of just large finned fish.

You can see the different blend shape models, and they're quite exaggerated because the blend shape values end up being fractional when implemented in the engine. The fins are different colours because we used the vertex colour to determine what UV sets the fins and tail would use. We were planning on having more fin varieties, but we ended up not having enough time, partially due to my inexperience in Unreal and in making art.

We wanted to use different pattern textures as well but did not have enough time to make them and test them out I'm also sure that I didn't end up making full use of the gradient mapping technique but it was a solid test!

As you can see I used the unreal nodes to just map the greyscale texture onto different points and that ended up mapping all the grey values with the colours, then we created an unreal material instance and would randomize the colours when the fish spawns in and here are the collapsed nodes I ended up using! you can see a lot more and better applications of this technique here https://www.patreon.com/posts/40192059 and https://joyrok.com/2D-Tech-Art-Chronicles-Gradient-Mapping

here is a picture of the collapsed nodes btw!

and here is what they end up looking like in the game with the randomized colours! without it, they would all be just grey!

I will say though it's very difficult to actually see the texture which is a shame because I spent a lot of time on it! oh well, a lesson for next time for sure!

raw fish texture if you want to try it out yourself! but it's honestly not a very polished application of gradient mapping definitely needs more tuning!

the next thing I want to break down is the procedural animation which is really really simple and definitely gave some positive results for the time spent!

these are the nodes we used to make the fish move pretty basic the body follows the rotation of the head and using unreals trail bones the body the fins and the rest all trail-making for fairly solid movement animations. Quinton added some wiggle by adding some rotation when the fish moves in the blueprints and it plugs into the rotation variable as you see there!

this is the rig of the fish it ain't pretty and I would have liked to add another joint near the head/neck but didn't do it until it was too late so it's not in the build and so it's not in the post!

Thanks for checking out our post and I really hope you give our game a try!