I think I am going to start this post with a statement about what I thought of this assignment. It was the hardest piece of work I have done so far on this course. By Far.
Obviously then, I had numerous problems and challenges to overcome with this one. I made a brand new map as the map I made for the last assignment wasn't really conducive to this kind of thing, it was made just for the purposes of the matinee work. The idea for my map came from the Warsong Gulch map from World of Warcraft, which is simply a 10 on 10 capture the flag map.
I gave it a more futuristic feel and stripped it down a little, so the emphasis is on the actors and not the map. There are two "base" rooms where my teams start, and a tunnel leading down to the main part of the map, each room is identical to the other one. My commentators are watching the action from a walkway high above the level, placed in the middle. Their positioning means they could see anything happening in the main middle part of my map.
So then basically the theme of my film is a deathmatch, three on three. A very basic premise but true to Unreal's simple and frantic gameplay. One team suffers an early knockback and is down to one player left, who in heroic fashion manages to come from 2-0 down to win 3-2.
One of the main problems I had with this assignment was getting the timings right of when things should happen. I solved this problem by using a series of sub action triggers in my scenes, so that I could accurately cue up when things would play. I also had to make sure I left sufficient space inbetween the actors saying things so that their speech wouldn't overlap.
I think the main problem I had was being able to get my bots to shoot each other, something that resulted in numerous crashes of UnrealEd, though I got there in the end with it, using damage instigators so I could know when a shot would kill a bot.
Overall despite the difficulty of the assignment, I did enjoy the creative aspect and definitely look forward to seeing other peoples efforts.
