When we first started this project, I had an immediate idea, a walking simulator where you explore a location set in one of my personal favourite universes, the SCP Foundation. My goal was to create a simplistic layout of one of the Foundation's Sites, based of inspiration from the two most popular SCP games, SCP: Containment Breach, and SCP: Secret Laboratory. I had hoped that I would be able to add a few sentient SCPs for the player to interact with through conversation or experiments, however I struggled to find models for them or ways to incorporate them into my level. Now that the project is over however I have a much clearer view of what I would change and what I would focus on more.

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I decided to research as much as I could about the setting and characters that I would be using, and the treasure trove of information for this was the official SCP wikidot, where all the documents and stories regarding the universe are made and published. I also looked into the previously mentioned two games to see what mechanics the developers of those games had used, and ways that they had incorporated the entities.

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Because I was so passionate and driven to make this game, I believe I rushed ahead too quickly and did not spend enough time planning how exactly the game would come together and what mechanics I would make. The majority of the entities used in SCP media are always projected as enemies and obstacles to avoid, which wouldn't fit the genre of the "walking simulator" genre prompt we were given. Because of this lack of planning, very few of the SCP's I had planned actually make an appearance in my game, and it ended up being more of a visual experience than the gameplay based experience that I had initially set out to create.

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I had encountered a few problems during the production of my project besides my lack of planning. The first problem I encountered was the lighting of my modular assets was not smooth, and looked very out of place, which luckily was a fairly easy fix. My biggest issue however was the skeletal meshes, I wanted to have the SCPs and guards be animated and move around, to give a feeling of life to them, but I could not understand or figure out how to properly import the meshes into unreal in a way that would make them compatible with the already existing third person character animations. In the end I gave up, and instead only was able to pose the model as a static mesh.

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I feel that my skills with Unreal have developed even further by the end of this project, now I have knowledge of widgets and how to create overlays on the players screen, which I used to display SCP documents. As well as a drive to learn how to properly use and animate skeletal meshes. I hope that in future projects I will be able to use these new skills to create something even better, with properly animated characters and even more complex overlays, like perhaps a health or stamina bar.

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In conclusion, I am happy with what I was able to create in the time I was given, the environment is exactly how I wanted it to be, but is sadly missing some of the gameplay elements I had envisioned. Due to my absence due to Covid-19 I lost a significant amount of time, which I had planned to use to develop the audio of my game. Despite all its flaws however, the product I created meets the purpose I had designed it to, it is a short demo of a game, designed for fans of the SCP Universe, and I hope that in time outside of college, I may have the chance to turn it into a complete experience for the public to enjoy.