Battle-Train!
Nathan Duker
Advisor: Sharleen Smith
One man’s misadventures in trying to get a bacon egg and cheese turn into mayhem as he’s sucked into illegal underground fighting on the subway one late night.
Project Description
"Battle Train!" is a game/narrative experience built in Unreal Engine 5.
Technical Details
The project was built using Unreal Engine, Blender and Substance Painter. Mainly due to my background with 2D illustration, I had to transition over to 3D for the sake of getting the project done. It's a video-game/narrative experience that's in early stages of development.
Research/Context
For my final project at ITP, I spent quite a bit of time brainstorming around what I wanted to do. Seeing as it's my last project, I wanted to make sure that what I worked on would be memorable, enjoyable, but most of all: badass. I spent some time bouncing around various ideas. I knew I really wanted to work on doing something in a game engine, so that I could learn some new skills while building. One day, I was sitting with a good friend of mine on the subway, after an afternoon of goofing off and pondering the universe's deepest question: what if you could fight professionally on the subway and make money from it? Hence: BATTLE TRAIN was born.
The idea was pretty straightforward: we would tell the story of a guy who accidentally gets sucked into a world of illegal, literal underground fighting. We immediately got to work, as I started working on visuals and my friend worked on writing a seriously stellar opening act. As such, I made it my final mission to bring our vision to fruition.
I have experience working in Game Engines, specifically Unity. I have my game dev classes and my own curiosity to thank for that. Building games in Unity is fun, but I really wanted to make sure that I could prototype quickly, while also having visually appealing assets that I could leverage and quickly put into my scene without getting too sucked into the world of C# scripting. So I decided that Unreal Engine and Blueprints would be the place to do the work. This would be my first time doing some solo dev work in Unreal Engine, so I was excited to figure that out on my own. One problem: I have used Unreal Engine for Mocap purposes, kitbashing and environment building, but hadn't dabbled in interactivity and mechanics yet. But I would soon prepare myself to do so by doing the research throughout the Thesis timeline.