Color Craft

Background

Color Craft is an adventure game developed alongside a team of four others using Unreal Engine with Blueprints. The game seeks to present the effects colonialism has on the environment.

Concepts

Early on in development, the team and I struggled with what cultural issue we were going to tackle. More specifically, how we could even tackle an issue with a game. It’s one thing to write an essay on an issue, but it is entirely another beast to make a game around and about it. This struggle truly was a precursor to the hardest game I’ve had to design, as all of my other games simply needed to be fun or function to a desired extent. Many of us, including myself, had previously researched and written essays on colonialism in gaming, so we decided to start there and delve into many of the same sources we pulled from. In researching my essay, I found that many portrayals show colonialism as a losing battle, so do we depict that as our primary narrative and mechanic? Immediately following that thought, I pitched this to my team:

A game where “you win by losing.” You better yourself and your position by collecting resources within the world, but the world becomes damaged the more resources you collect. So the question the player would be asking themselves would be: Should/Do I prioritize my selfish needs or should/do I prioritize the preservation and health of the world? What is the balance?

This became the proposal that we built the project off of. The game sees the player sent off to a new world by their company to collect resources to save their job and provide for their impoverished family; however, they crash land onto the new world, and their boat is drained of all its color, making it useless. Equipped with a color drainer, they must gather the colors necessary to recolor their boat. We decided to center the mechanics around using a color drainer to drain the world’s color instead of traditional resource harvesting methods in order to stress the environmental themes and narrative. Players visually see that they are harming the world each time they drain a resource’s color.

Development and Learning Curve

This was my first ever game in Unreal Engine, so the title of “Learning Curve” is a bit of an understatement. A challenge is exactly what I wanted, though; we had the option to use any software we wanted, but instead of choosing something I am experienced at, i.e., Unity, I wanted to expand my toolkit. On top of not even knowing how to begin such a narrative-driven game, I did not know how to even start an Unreal Engine project. It did not help that most of my team was new to Unreal Engine too! All you have to do in this situation is just start up a new project and play around, and that is exactly what I did. I knew the game was going to be in first-person, so I created a project using Unreal’s first-person template, and I decided to make the game’s scripting Blueprints oriented. I already had C++ experience and Blueprints was an entirely new concept to me, and one that took me weeks and nearly an entire YouTube tutorial playlist to fully grasp. Past that, the team and I just did what we could.

I had a handful of tasks to accomplish during development, with first being creating our environment. I created the grassy area that is visible in the above video using Unreal Engine’s landscaping along with placing all of the flora within it. My experience with Unity landscaping made this easier. The map was designed to highlight the different colors of our environment while being a fun playground. Vibrant colors were chosen since they would look sharply different when greyed out, also allowing them to stand out amongst the still-colored trees. After a teammate added in the ocean and beach landscape, I created a beach material to color the landscape with and blended the grassy area with the beach. Unfortunately, the original trees and their materials had to be replaced with a blueprint of each tree type that inherited a color-draining mechanic. These trees had more uniform colors since the original materials would not work properly with the color-draining script. Thankfully, my original placements were all able to remain intact.

The tricky part began when I actually started using Blueprints to tie our two biggest mechanics together. Once the main color-draining mechanic and the crafting menu were complete, I integrated the two and created a greyed-out version of our boat Blueprint. The boat was a model I found that I colored and greyed out, so I knew what materials needed changing, and before these mechanics were completed, I created a test blueprint to determine the nodes required to alter these materials. Before starting the final blueprint, I first had to keep the player’s inventory updated with the colors they got. Thankfully, my teammate who did the HUD and crafting menu set up much of this logic; I just had to make sure it updated after every tree. I also had to update the orange color since it was not a natural color in our environment. This involved updating the crafting many to include a “make orange” button and creating the logic for updating the orange, as shown below. I know it looks ugly, but I did my best…

I use that as an example because it touches on fetching, checking, and updating the colors as well as the UI. After that, it all just a matter of using similar logic to fetch and check each color when the player presses the “craft” button and then changing the correct material on the greyed-out boat. Typing this out, I realize that all of this kind of sounds easy, and it was to an extent, but creating something that sounds as simple as “press button = coloring in a boat” can be infuriating when you are learning new software. You don’t know what to do, you don’t know what to grab, you don’t know what to create, or you ESPECIALLY don’t know how to fetch public variables. I mean, how hard is it to get a public freaking variable?? Through tutorials and sheer will, I got it figured out and successfully created a fully functioning (but a little buggy) game loop!

After that, I set off to improve the quality of it all, fixing some UI, debugging, and creating a cheat for better testing.

All of this and more can be viewed in our project folder here. This folder includes the Windows build of the game, the opening cutscene that we had to leave out because of technical difficulties and time constraints, a full gameplay video, and our final write-up that delves a lot more into how we tied our sources into our project, barring my teammate’s personal statements.

Takeaways

Unreal Engine is a beast, but it was very interesting. It is an extremely powerful, complex tool that in hindsight is not as bad to use as I originally imagined. Maybe because it is similar to Unity in certain ways…? Anyway, I am very grateful for the opportunity to make a game in the software, and Blueprints are really cool haha! I don’t know how sustainable they are for a more expansive project, but for a small one like this, they were pretty great.

I am also very appreciative of my team and our ability to tie an entire game around a narrative with a thesis. I never could imagine that we would pull this off as successfully as we did, but playing the game and seeing all of the trees completely grey is very potent. This has definitely made my narrative integration stronger.

Dissemination

Outside of the project itself, we also created a dissemination for it, viewable here. This was an interesting undertaking, but one that helped me visualize our project and how it could succeed commercially.

Scrapped Content

We ended up leaving out a lot of the initial pitch. This was to be expected and one of the reasons we created such an expansive proposal. The main thing we left off is the multiple endings:

1. Collecting the bare minimum resources required to rebuild your transportation and go back home to your family. You lose your job and sink further into poverty, but you maintain the beautiful environment.

2. Collect the resources tasked upon you by your company. You are able to rebuild your transportation to go home and you keep your job, but much more of the environment is drained, unable to recover.

3. You drain the world for most, if not all, of its resources, selling the additional resources to get you and your family out of poverty.

These endings would have given the player a lot more freedom in how they would have cemented themselves on the line of environmental sustainability versus personal wealth/growth. It is a shame we left this out, as I think it would have made our narrative al to richer.