Grigorios Kontadakis, "Development of a 3D action role playing game", Diploma Work, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2013
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.13104
The purpose of this project is the creation of an entertainment 3D Third Person Action Role Playing Game titled Broken Dreams. A 3D game is usually developed by a team of more than one person. Nowadays, high quality games are designed by large teams that consist mainly of art designers, who are responsible for the game content creation, and programmers, who are responsible for the gameplay creation and putting all the pieces together. It is a real challenge to create a one-person project taking responsibility for both the artistic and programming parts respectively.The Broken Dreams concept takes place in the middle-ages in a small city which is ruled by a vicious monarch. This ruler has deprived people of their dreams and forced them to sleep forever. The only person that is still unaffected by this eternal sleep is the main character of the game. His purpose is to try and wake up the residents of this town from their sleep. There is only one way to do that. By entering people‟s dreams and fighting with their nightmares.Most of the gameplay involves people‟s dreams, where the character is confronted with nightmares that he must defeat. In order to accomplish this he must unleash Powers (magic skills) upon the nightmares of the city‟s residents. Currently there are ten Powers implemented in the game, which are divided in two categories: Fire and Ice Powers. As the character becomes stronger (by means of power leveling), his powers grow stronger as well.The AI Players are also divided in two categories: Fire and Ice Pawns. For the AImovement the typical method used is an A* algorithm due to its low execution time (in comparison to other algorithms) which is crucial in a real-time application. In the current approach, the optimal paths are pre-computed and stored in a 2D array allowing the recovery of an optimal path at O(1) time. So by sacrificing a bit of memory space, optimal time performance is achieved.The game engine used for the creation of Broken Dreams is Unreal Engine 3 [1] via the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) [2] and UnrealScript [3] tools which are free for noncommercial use. UDK offers a vast amount of control over certain game elements such us meshes, particle systems, animation, sound, physics, etc. UnrealScript is a scripting language with Java-like syntax which focuses on the interactions between game objects, such as attacking an enemy, picking up an object etc. The coordination of Unreal Engine elements can produce extraordinary results which are only limited by the time available for development and one‟s imagination.