MIDNIGHT JUNK

Midnight Junk

Developed for Epic MegaJam 2023
Theme: "Antiquated Future"

As a challenge I wanted to take part in the "Army of one" category. By developing a game completely solo. Midnight Junk turned out to be a bit too much. But ended up being a really fun project none the less.

Midnight Junk is a Blade Runner inspired game taking place in smoky neon lit streets.

You are a decommisioner, a robot tasked with hunting down and decomissioning those models deemed to old or deviant to remain in service.

By completing enough decomissions you can earn your very own ticket to the cloud where you retire for good and live out the rest of your clock-cycles.

Each mission consisting of a location and target briefing. You need to find and figure out how to approach your next target.

Interpretation of theme Antiquated Future: 

My initial idea was a smoky noir robot detective game. Imagine Nick Valentine from fallout 4 combined with the Nighthawks painting by Edward Hopper.

It landed on a slightly different concept where instead of being a detective, you are a blade runner-esque decomissioner tasked with taking out older models.

Game loop

Get an assignment

Find the target

Discover their weakness

Complete the decommission


Each new target would conveniently have a new strength that would render them immune from your previous tool.

Capturing the Noir Feel

When I hear Noir. 

I think of dank gloomy streets lit by signs and streetlights.
Ambient smoke and neon sign.


My first inspiration was the Nighthawks painting by Edward Hopper. As it captures some of that gloom.


Lumen is doing some heavy lifting when it comes to projecting light from the emissive sign materials. This is the first time I've been happy with the result delivered. You still notice some artifacts that look like voxelized light volumes.

Post Process effects

Assets

All modeling and rigging done in blender. Animations sourced from Mixamo.

Tiling textures, and decals made in Substance Designer then projection mapped in Unreal.

Props and Characters textured in Substance Painter.

For future projects, I'll probably try to reduce the Substance Designer workflow. While building materials from the ground up through graphs gives a lot of control. The time vs. cost is way to high compared to creating the base height textures inside Photoshop or similar, then using designer to generate and pack them before going into unreal.


Characters






Robots

To keep it as simple as possible, while still maintaining some variety.

Each robot consists of a common base body. 

At runtime  the Head, Eyes and Chassis color is picked at random.

Animations

To avoid wasting more time than necessary. The bot animations are sourced from Mixamo.

Additional animations are made with blender and some runtime animations using Anim Blueprints.

Mixamo is still the reigning champion when it comes to pre-prod animations.

Behavior and Avoidance

Robots have two base behaviors. Animating or locomotion.

Animation is an input consuming state. I.e. Any state that does not require the bot to move. Like dancing, lifting weights, or laying on the ground.

Robots walk around the level using a very basic avoidance script. A startled robot starts running, using the same avoidance system.

Avoidance

The avoidance system is very similar to a white cane. The bots do a sweeping trace in front of themselves to find obstructions. In case there is a blocking collision, they adjust their walking direction based on the hit normal.


Damage

All bots have health and respond to damage. Taking damage spawns some basic oil splat VFX and sends them running.

On death bots send a notify the game state to keep track of collateral deaths. Quest NPCs have unique triggers sent to the contract system to track progress in quests when relevant.

NPCs and Contracts







Mission Giver

The mission giver comes and goes. The only robot without limbs, he hovers around giving you directions, as well as notifying you about the current status with HQ.

In reality he is a cube with eyes. A simple movement script and sound source that play context based sound cues. 

Heavily directed by the the mission state system. He can follow path nodes that define where he should go when he's not following a target.

First Contract - Bulbo 2000

The impossible to miss. Bulbo 2000 is a glam robot who has broken societal rules by installing a disco-tron module for a head and playing loud obnoxious music in the streets.

Bulbo is the first hit assignment. Meant to set the tone for the rest of the game.


Weakness

Blunt force will easily shatter his Disco-Tron head module. Next to the boombox is a conveniently placed pipe.

Second Contract - Piston

Piston is a scrap compactor who instead of compacting has decided to start lifting junk. Piston has a titanium shell making it impervious to physical damage. The metal pipe found in your previous mission wont make a dent. 

You find piston in a makeshift gym in a back alley.

Weakness

Piston has a load limit on it's servos. If you rearrange the weights in his gym you will be able to overload his weight capacity. You can find these weight plates scattered around the level

Third Contract - Teller

Teller is a messenger robot accused of spreading illegal propaganda. You get to know teller frequents a bar nearby. What you don't know is that teller isn't just a regular robot. Rather, teller is the radio sitting on the desk of the bar. When entering the bar, you can notice an audio track cutting from political style speeches to music.

Weakness

Teller can be defeated by unplugging it from the wall. The gimmick is to subvert expectations and give a concept of "robots" being any kind of mundane appliance.

Mission System

The technical side of the mission system is completely made in blueprints due to time constraint.

Missions are tracked by the game state. Each contract has a unique world actor tracking related objects and trigger volumes.

Contract Actors maintain all related quest triggers.

Contracts

Contracts exist as world actors. Each contract keeps track of contract specific actors. They keep track of all relevant trigger volume, and listen to any events being triggered. 

AI voice acting

This is the first time I've tried using AI generated voice acting.

I'm honestly surprised and a bit terrified how well it worked. Though the voices didn't always deliver the tone you would expect. Being slightly of tonaly and emotionaly sounds very artificial, which I think works in favor for the bots.

Controversy aside. AI voice acting is super fast and convenient. Using AI to power pre-production will probably become the norm if it isn't already.

Generated voice lines are then post processed and edited in a DAW before imported into Unreal.

The voices are layered with:

Sounds are played in engine using meta sounds. There is no complex logic running behind the scenes. Using sound cues is generally faster unless you require more advanced FX chains. 

VFX

Splatter from texture sheets

Oil spatter

Given the characters being robots. It would be only natural for them to bleed oil.

Texture Sheet

The oil spatter is made out of a 5x5 texture sheet 

Albedo, Normal & Alpha generated with Substance Designer

Decal row and column is selected based on world position. This is something I've wanted to try to create synchronized decals for multiplayer games just by setting decal world position.

This setup is currently only useful for static decals.

World Position Selection

World position is used to sample the texture sheet.

Left Column:

The offset between decals is the same creating a repeating pattern (bad)

Middle Column:

Rotation breaks up some pattern repetition. (ok)

Right Column:

Slight location offsets samples a different part of the texture. 

Useful Noise

Basic Noise

Tiling noise textures are always handy.

A single texture with different scaled tiling noise packed to the RGBA channels that can be re-used across the entire project while leaving a small texture memory footprint.

Fog Cards

Combined panning cloud noise that fades based on pixel depth. For that added smoky ambiance

Breaking up tiling textures

Another use for cloud noise is alleviating some of the more obviously repeating patterns.

Adding grime to brick for example

Take aways:

Scope down:

Making a narrative semi-open world game in 7 days is not really feasible. It was clear pretty early that the game would be to out of scope to finish in time for the jam. This gave me some more confidence experimenting with tools that are usually not meant for game jams giving me a chance to explore new workflows. 

Game jams are the best R&D:

As always, Game jams are the best place to try out new tech and ideas. While the workflows are far from optimized, the limited time frame forces me to think outside of the box when problem solving often leading to some new found approaches to development.

AI is coming for our jobs:

AI tools have reached a point where they can replace many parts of the traditional pipelines. While these tools may be banned by shipping platform owners. I am certain the use of AI will explode in pre-production and ultimately make it's way into mainstream content pipelines.

Being able to use AI in game jams can allow developers to create games that would otherwise be out of reach in the allotted time.

Create re-usable libraries quickly and avoid granular workflows:

The largest time sink was creating material textures from scratch in substance designer. While I'm pleased with the results for the time given.

Instead of producing materials from scratch in substance painter. Instead generating the tiling textures and patterns and rebuilding them in unreal will probably speed up the workflow immensely.

Creating a basic material library early with common functionality that can be re-used within the engine is obviously faster than creating a new library outside the engine that needs repeated setup and configuration.

Making games is more fun in a team:

Collaborating on ideas and learning new things together is always more fun. Speaks for itself! :)