Finally, A Day Off is a game made in Unreal Engine for my game design class. We were told to make an educational game for our first time ever making a game. One of the ideas proposed was a somewhat open-world city block, filled with NPCs, that the player could navigate freely. The main focus of the game is on “Mindfulness”, how your actions can affect others. My group picked this idea out of the many presented because we thought we could make a fun and interesting game around the concept. My main goal with this project was to get familiar with Unreal Engine and GitHub. I learned a lot about Unreal Engine and the game design pipeline, and if I could start again with the knowledge I had now I feel like I could be much more efficient. My contributions to game are in the buildings and characters. I modeled the base NPC mesh, the restaurant building and the Maximo Solutions office building, and I built the Apartment and Hospital buildings and the apartment and restaurant interiors with assets from a pack found by my groupmate. I worked a lot in the character blueprint, and the animation blueprint, learning how to make our NPCs animate and respond to player input. I also added accessories found online to each NPC to make them unique, and created spline paths and node connections for the vehicles to move. I originally wanted to model everything we used but we quickly realized that was an ambitious goal for the time we had to make this, while also learning the game engine. After doing this project for a semester, I feel like I have a pretty good base understanding of Unreal Engine and the blueprint system.
