Introduction

Hello and welcome to the first development blog for our game project for the Group Projects course at Digital Arts and Entertainment Howest. 

First and foremost, introductions are in order: 

Our team consists of 5 talented junior game developers. Two programmers, Lucy Lesire and Connor De Meyer. Along with 3 artists, Noah Baumann, Dylan Boddaert and Levy van Malder. 

It's nice to meet you!

Gameplay

The game will be a top down multiplayer free-for-all arena couch game. 

Starting each round, you will be placed in a random map consisting of set tile pieces. You, the brave piece of fruit, will try to hold your own against the other players using various fruit, or food-related weapons and abilities at your disposal. There’s a twist though: During the round some of the tile pieces will start to crumble, leaving a part of the map exposed for you to fall in. 

The above image is very much a work in progress, but it shows the concept of our map designs.

Programming

Unity vs Unreal

The first thing we had to figure out was the engine we would be using. We looked at a lot of differences between the engines:

Unity uses C# as its main programming language which is very easy and fast to use. Compare that to Unreal’s C++ which is very complex and not for beginners. Thankfully Unreal has the blueprints system which would make it easy for both programmers and artists to work on the game.

Because we are aiming for a simplistic and stylized art design, we would be able to use both engines for the graphics. Unity would be better in this case because it is more lightweight and would make the game easily portable to other devices like mobile.

However, Unreal’s implementation of animation and AI graphs would save the programmers time by unloading some of the work to the artists because of its simplicity and visual scripting.

Because we are making a local multiplayer game Unreal has the advantage because it has out of the box multiplayer components that would also make it easier to make it online multiplayer.

We will be designing our levels by hand using modular hexagonal pieces, so it would be very helpful to use Unity’s prefab system.

In the end we decided to go with unreal because the time we are given is limited and we would like to make a polished game. Our artists are not familiar with Unity so more work would be unloaded onto both programmers. Both engines have their ups and downs and we think that neither one would aid us more than the other in developing our game.

developing the prototype

We started off making a small arena and trying out Unreal’s multiplayer capabilities. It was a bit hard at first to understand how the multiple player controllers worked and how we would be able to control each player with a different controller. Luckily Unreal handles most of that for us and with a bit of code we made multiplayer possible.

Next we implemented a weapon base class and a projectile base class from which we inherited from and made some basic weapons we could shoot at each other.

We then swiftly made a level in Maya and exported it into UE4. We came up with the idea of making the islands sink after a while, and after implementing it correctly we had a better grasp on the pacing of the game. Because we decided to make the pace of the game fast, the island would have to disappear very fast as well.

Art

We knew right from the start the art direction should follow a stylized design, with exaggerated proportions. The characters. for example should be visible from a certain distance to make it easier for the players to follow their character. 

A strong and coherent art style should not just attract players to the game, it should enhance and work together with the core gameplay. 

That’s why we have decided to go for a heavily stylized design, with handpainted textures and low poly models. The characters will be made using a mid poly workflow, polished with PBR Material aspects. 

In games like this, the satisfaction level is extremely important. That’s why we’ve devoted a lot of time to figuring out good animation and vfx workflows.

The characters will use detailed rigs to display some nice stylized exaggerated emotion, as well as cartoonish movement. 

Some quick rough sketches to show off our playable characters. Expect some whacky fun to be had with these guys!

Next week, we’ll have done a ton more research and prototyping, in order to really nail down and define our art direction and gameplay mechanics. 

Hopefully you’ll join us then!