BOY AND HIS WOLF | nathansown

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A boy and his wolf

An interactive narrative set in the near future. Sam, a boy who's family recently suffered a great loss, must address his grief in a surreal dreamscape. Sam is accompanied by his family's household robot, WOLF.

My group and I created this project in Unreal Engine 4 in the Fall of 2015. I worked on level design, in engine layout, game design and development. Most of my effort went towards sequencing the WOLF animations and conversations.

My construction of Sam's home in Unreal Engine 4	Dialogue trigger boxes were arranged to cue dialogue between WOLF and Sam at key locations.
	In Maya I took an exported obj of Sam's house and arranged the locations of Sam and WOLF at the start and end of every conversation and interaction. This was meant to help our animator animate WOLF in the correct scale and exact location within our UE4 scene.
Purple spheres = WOLF. Orange flags = approximate location of the player, AKA Sam, when a conversation is cued	I created a Dialogue Trigger Box class asset that allowed for easy arrangement of voice acting recordings and the addition of appropriate pauses between lines of dialogue.
Close up of dialogue box blueprint.	Details window of dialogue box asset.
WOLF was a challenge because she was not a traditional character that could be controlled in a straight forward way with UE4's character animation system. Most of my time was spent adjusting her animations and finding workarounds for switching between animation states.	Close up of event graph in animation bp.
Close up of event graph in animation bp.	Bird's eye view of the forest level and all it's dialogue and ambient sound triggers.
First archway intersection. Each archway and, especially, forks in the forest path were matched with a line of Sam's dialogue showing his progression through the bargaining stage of grief.

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A boy and his wolf

My construction of Sam's home in Unreal Engine 4

Dialogue trigger boxes were arranged to cue dialogue between WOLF and Sam at key locations.

In Maya I took an exported obj of Sam's house and arranged the locations of Sam and WOLF at the start and end of every conversation and interaction. This was meant to help our animator animate WOLF in the correct scale and exact location within our UE4 scene.

Purple spheres = WOLF. Orange flags = approximate location of the player, AKA Sam, when a conversation is cued

I created a Dialogue Trigger Box class asset that allowed for easy arrangement of voice acting recordings and the addition of appropriate pauses between lines of dialogue.

Close up of dialogue box blueprint.

Details window of dialogue box asset.

WOLF was a challenge because she was not a traditional character that could be controlled in a straight forward way with UE4's character animation system. Most of my time was spent adjusting her animations and finding workarounds for switching between animation states.

Close up of event graph in animation bp.

Close up of event graph in animation bp.

Bird's eye view of the forest level and all it's dialogue and ambient sound triggers.

First archway intersection. Each archway and, especially, forks in the forest path were matched with a line of Sam's dialogue showing his progression through the bargaining stage of grief.