The Valley of Grief
The Valley of Grief is a research project from 2023. During this project I learnt how to use the Unreal Engine 5 engine, as well as learning ways of depicting the different phases of grief.
My aim with this project was to discover ways to depict grief in a visual setting and then to create them within an environment. I had an aspiration of displaying the five most commonly accepted phases of grief, so that the player would be able to go in between them to try to be as open to as many experiences as possible. In reality this was an unreasonable scope, so I limited it to three recognised grief phases, depicting them in ways that are commonly experienced.
01
Ideation
The beginning idea was to make the environment change with the player reflecting on their grief journey as they walked through the experience. I wanted to have assets switched out during play, but this was too big a scope with my no experience in Unreal Engine. So I ended up with the idea of three environments with parts that overlap and merge to try to make it seem seamless.
02
Learning
To create this project I knew I would need to get a better understanding of Unreal Engine so I started by finding some simple tutorials on how to create terrain, using the in-engine tools as well as adding assets from Quixel Bridge. This helped with learning how to use research as a tool when finding something specific you needed to learn. The other big part of my research was into grief and trying to understand its more complicated experiences tangibly, and then to make my environment reflect it. This was a big challenge and took a few weeks to understand how I could do it effectively.
03
Creation
To make the actual environment was quite fun, it took a while to find the correct assets or asset packs but once down and placing them it went quite quickly. I did try to use the terrain tools but they ended up lagging the project too much so I switched to using the Modelling tool which gave me a low poly version of the terrain I wanted. Then I placed down my rocks and assets on this to try to replicate the look of the terrain using rocks.
04
Challenges
The process was usually smooth and I had some problems I or my tutor could solve, otherwise, I found tutorials to fix them. The biggest challenge I encountered was using too many high-quality assets. At one stage the project files were around 200Gb, I scaled this down to 55Gb at the end. And when the game was built it was 4Gb.
