Noir 3D Platformer

 Noir game

What is noir?

Noir is the theme of having a bleak and rather cynical quality. Most of the time noir is applied to dark movies with a good portion of crime fighting or death present within the film or media. Noir can also have sub genres such as neo noir which follows the same theme of being dark and elusive whilst being set in a modern period. Usually neo-noir is combined with vibrant neon colours whilst still retaining the dark themes like violence and otherwise mystery.

What are examples of noir games/films?

An example of noir in mainstream media is Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. This is because of the very violent themes and dark plot that the game entails as you play as a criminal who takes down Russian mobs and mob bosses. Eventually after your mass spree of bloody murder. Miami is finally nuked and the game series ends there with jacket and biker dying to said nuke.

 Another example of noir media is Max Payne which is a very story driven game and follows a killer who will not stop to avenge his family. The game centers on former NYPD detective Max Payne, who attempts to solve the murder of his family while uncovering the meaning behind a mysterious new drug called "Valkyr". While doing so, Max becomes snared in a large and complex conspiracy involving a major pharmaceutical company, and a secret society with the U.S. military.

Katana Zero is a 2019 platform game created by the indie developer Justin Stander. Set in a dystopian metropolis, the neo-noir storyline follows Subject Zero, a katana-wielding assassin with amnesia who can slow down time and predict the future. Zero unravels his past while completing assassination contracts. The game is similar to hotline Miami in the sense that if you're hit its time to restart from the last checkpoint. The game ends with you the player killing your manipulator, your psychiatrist.

What is good/bad about these?

Hotline Miami is a good and bad example. Good because it has heavy themes of noir aspects in the sense of crime and death. However on the other hand it heavily leans on the violence factor and differs from the more mysterious part of the noir theme as a whole

Max Payne is a good example the story revolves around max's wife and daughter being murdered as well as the use of drugs/the creation of drugs which heavily fits into the noir theme of dark and despair. This example has hardly any downsides other than the fact that it has been reused many times for several games and movies.

Katana Zero is similar to Hotline Miami as it has a lot of violence and keeps up with the theme of noir by having an immense of amount of crime, but unfortunately relies on violence, again like Hotline Miami.

Mood Board

 

Plot/Story

Its 8pm and you are driving home and feel like something horrible has went wrong at home so Don (the spy) rushes home to go see if anything bad has went wrong, as he is pulling up the door, he sees there is a mask laying on the ground with a puddle of blood coming from it like its someone been stabbed and it has splattered into the mask. 

 

As Don opens the door, he sees the horror of his wife laying on the ground with a knife puncher in her chest, so he is looking around to try help him find any clues to find out who the killer is and sees on the side of the restful wife and not with splatters of blood saying “I have killed you wife, if you want your revenge you will have to come find me” 

 

Don thinks about it and goes outside to see if anything else has been found, but to his luck nothing was there so he has to go back into his house to a computer that it able to take DNA and find out who the killer is, and so he finds out who the killer is and turns out he only lives a few houses down so he goes up close to his house and people come out screaming. 

 

The house was full of his gangster helpers that will protect him as long as he can and so Don fights them as much as they can so that he can take the criminal in and behind bars but there are too many people to kill, so he is there for a while he tries to get in he is struggling to get to him so once he finally gets to him he is defeat he is taken to jail and is found guilty

Progress 18/01/24-19/01/24

Scrum meeting

Today Matthew was doing blog work whilst Aidan began to start work on unity and began to code enemy AI, Hannah also did blog work and I started the modeling process of one of the weapons (with Dan's permission). It's worth noting that this model is not the final version and will be changed slightly or completely overhauled depending on how well the meshes turn out as I go along. Many tools were used to transform a simple cube into the current model such as the extrude and create edge loop tools.

Progress 25/01/24-26/01/24

Scrum meeting

I made more progress on the gun model and made a crowbar for the enemy to use. Aidan began to code enemy ai in unity but ran into some bugs/errors when doing so. Hannah made a park bench, some trees and some fencing for the environments. Matthew made some more props for the indoor places like lamps and etc. I made a crowbar from a single cylinder and an edge loop, I extruded the faces at the top and bottom of the cylinder to produce the bent claw and and rounded heel of the crowbar, this process also allowed me to make the second end of the item.

Scrum meeting

I went back and remade the stock of the tommy gun as it was rather low quality before, now it it is in a higher quality because i have added a sort of bevel to it. I also managed to make the handle of the gun but i am still working on making the trigger. It may be difficult with how much the mesh decides to start breaking for no apparent reason. Progress is good. In order to create the grip and stock of the gun, I had  to extrude faces and then shift their position in order to produce a grip, the relocation of faces was not needed for the stock as it was much more straight forward.

Scrum meeting 30/1/24

Progress 14/2/24-16/2/24

I finished the model for the tommy gun and imported it into substance painter, I selected a wooden texture that would be appropriate for the handle, underside and stock of the gun. I then cleaned up the edges to remove any blurry parts. This can also be prevented by setting the hardness of the brush to 100. This part was the easiest of the lot other than the fact that substance painter crashed 3 times while texturing this. 

Next I added a metallic texture to the otherwise metal part of the gun, by itself it didn't look too bad but I went back and added a layer of rusty metal and set its layer opacity to 60 to try and add some detail to the gun. I did not have to clean any edges as there was none to clean up. However I didn't feel like this was good enough for the final product as this didn't feel "old" or  "degraded" which is what I was trying to aim for.

While there may not be too much of a visual difference other than the tone being slightly darker, I  assure you that there is a difference. The reason the magazine is not in any of these photos is because it is a separate model and therefore it must be textured separately. I will use the same metal technique for the magazine to keep with consistency. I am happy with the model as it was my first time modelling a gun like this. However, I did not enjoy the fact that I had to restart the model four times since it kept breaking for no apparent reason and causing a lot of stress.

GDD

The game design document important is important is important because it allows for creators to come together and plan out how they will each together execute their idea, most of us in our team did not get this memo. If a team can coordinate and successfully put together a game design document then making a game/game prototype should be a lot easier than without the game design document.

Scrum meetings

Trello Screenshot

This is the trello page that me and my group members had curated. Most of the stuff labelled "to do" never got done, this is because we tasked Hannah with doing this and she then disappeared for around a week before coming back. Aidan also had a few days off because he had a headache as he stayed up until four in the morning playing overwatch and got no sleep. Matthew was one of the few people in our group who had actually gotten work done like he was asked to do, good job Matthew.

Progress 27/02/24

The noir theme can have a significant impact on gameplay mechanics. It more often then not introduces strategies that emphasize darkness, stealth and the shadows. The player themselves may end up solving elaborate puzzles and making tough choices that will effect how the player acts or how people may see the main character from their perspective. The gritty atmosphere and the overall darkness of the setting of a 'noir environment' can create a setting similarly to that of a graveyard or perhaps even a derelict neighborhood. The noir theme can be used very well in media especially in the time period of the 1940s to 1950s. Other types of techniques that could help to amplify the noir feeling are a lack of visibility in an area and/or a shadowy area to also limit any/all visibility. This is Aidans work.

The image provided above is a basic layout of our game area that we plan to use. It is a park area with trees, a fountain and a street with benches for people to sit on even though the player cannot sit on them for some apparent reason. The reasoning behind the player not being able to sit on the benches is because we did not plan on having a script for the player to sit down nor would there be a good reason other than cosmetics which serve no purpose other than to be for display.

This is the enemy AI code that was made by Aidan. It took the whole project to perfect as he ran into many errors such as the fact that the plane he was testing on also started to follow him instead of a test cylinder. Eventually in the end we managed to get the test cylinder to follow the player as opposed to the plane that the player is standing on following the player.

Aidan's Fish car rendition, made of several blocks and parts. Low-ish quality but i cant blame him since he was prioritising unity work over the modelling which isn't his main focus of work. I was Given the job of making a better one that was of a higher quality.

My first part of the fish car, made of a single cylinder and extrusions. It lacks wheels as they have not been modelled or added to the model yet since I was trying to figure out how to put wheels on a fish. If you didn't know, this is a hard task to perform. 

The fish car has gained its wheels however it is not ready to hit the road and stop crime yet. The eyes have yet to be added. The wheels were made by taking a cylinder, stretching it out and making the middle of the cylinder thinner to create an axel. This part is duplicated for the back wheels.

Fish car that me and Aidan made for the game. It was my idea to choose the fish car for our character as the main purpose/point of this car is for stealth since nobody or nothing suspects their to be a detective in a fish car just waiting to ambush them. The fish car will find you. You are NOT safe from the fish car. The fish car was the planned way of getting around in game but we never got around to programming it as we do not know how to make a car script nor would we know how to make it function as only one of us knows how to use unity in the group.

Post Mortem

Positives

We  managed to get a greyboxxed version of one of the levels, we also managed to apply simple colours and detail to this level. Another thing to add onto the list of positives was that most of the models that were made got put to use albeit a few of them were left out. The greyboxxed game did eventually see some colour brought to it but that did not effect gameplay too much.

Negatives

Towards the end of this project, we had to rush for time due to the fact that because some of the stuff that was planned to being implemented was not done along with the enemy AI taking a week and forever to work. This and the fact that only one of us in our team was able to do unity work as unity only worked on the computer they were using.

Final Thoughts

Could've been better if we had more time to work on it, since the time crunch limited our abilities to make a higher quality game. We must be more organised next time in order to produce a piece of work that is much better than what we eventually ended up with in the end.