Introduction

Hello, and welcome back! A lot has happened this week behind the scenes, and we’re very excited to share it with the world. While we came up with a pretty good idea of what the game would be like, and we were confident in what we wanted, a lot of questions were still floating around. This week, we mainly aimed to answer these questions, and do some research where necessary. To start off, lets begin with what we did for the prototype that we’ve made of the game:

Prototyping:

Because our prototype was already quite extensive in the previous week, we polished what we already had and played some quick matches with each other to get a general feel of how fun the gameplay is and what is lacking.

What did we change in the prototype?

We changed the dimensions of the hexagons and the environmental pieces to make the playable area smaller because we felt that there was too much space in between the players. We also put the walls in more organized locations so that the player may use them to strategically maneuver around and dodge enemy bullets.

The speed of the characters was also increased as it felt a lot more fun to be able to quickly go from one point of the level to the other.

We greatly diminished the crates around the level, which may change in the future. We had the idea of adding a bunch of destructible props around the level which could be destroyed and have a chance to leave behind pickups (inspired by dark souls).

Programming:

What did we research?

We did a lot of research on how Unreal Engine 4 works and the different features that it provides us. A lot of reading went into how the game instance, player controllers, player pawns, game modes, game states and player states all interact with each other and how we should use each one correctly to make a functional local multiplayer game.

Online multiplayer?

We’ve done a bit of research about online multiplayer but which would be an amazing feature to implement and give us a lot of valuable experience. Unfortunately we feel that it would take way too much time to actually implement it given our limited schedule. However we are still designing our framework with an online multiplayer design structure in mind by using Unreal’s architecture in the right way.

Art

We promised we would define some more aspects of the art style, and we aim to deliver. 

So while we still have to get started on the map itself, as well as characters, we now have a pretty good idea of the artstyle. 

For starters, we have decided on a theme for the game. We’re going with a mobster style 1920’s aesthetic. That means tomatoes as mafia bosses, an angry italian mushroom, you name it. This will give some extra character to the game.

This theme, on top of the already established "fruit and other foods" theme will give some flavour to the game, and allow us to go wild with the characters

 To give even more character, the players will have various reactions that fit their character during the game on the hud.

speaking of the HUD, we came up with a little mockup to show how it would (roughly) look like:

Now this mockup is nowhere near the finished product, but it should already give a feel as to what we’re going for. It also shows a ton of gameplay aspects too that we’ve finalized and decided to have in the game, such as a powerup mechanic (more on that later).

As we mentioned, we still had several questions floating around from last week. By the end of this week the goal was to have a concrete idea of what the game would look, feel and play like. That is why we set out to answer these questions, regarding the art of the game as well:

• What weapons will the game have?
• Will there be powerups to pick up, if so which?
• How will the props be made?
• How will the VFX look like?

So let's go over these one by one, shall we?

What weapons will the game have?

We finally made a list of weapons the game will have! All weapons are food based, and all of them come with their own unique way of firing, or in some cases, throwing. Currently, this is what we picked for the weapons:

1. The Leek. 
2. Acorn Minigun
3. Banana Boomerang
4. Pomegranate
5. The slow falling melon
6. The bowling coconut
7. Poisonous onion.
8. Orange 

What exactly these weapons will do is something we have already decided, but we will leave up to the players to find out since this devlog is already getting long enough.

Will there be powerups to pick up?

This is something we thought about for a while, because adding to many things to pick up, use, or happen could clutter the game. Since we already have different character passive abilities, normal weapons, special weapons and a moving game world we were afraid adding extra powerups on top of that could make the game too confusing to play. 

However, we said from the very beginning that we were going for a "chaotic" gameplay model. In that sense, adding some whacky powerups is exactly what we need. 

What you can expect from the powerups, and how these would look like floating around in the game world

How will the props, and other assets be made?

We will be using a pretty standard workflow for these assets for low-poly modelling, which means that we will be modelling these in Maya, unwrap them, and then create our materials in Adobe Substance painter. 

This means we will most likely not be using ZBrush to sculpt any models, as this would be unnecessary given the look of this game. This might be different for the characters however, as we are going for more of a mid poly workflow for those.

How will the VFX look like?

We've finally settled on what our VFX will look like. Given how in a game of this scope the feel is very important, we knew that some satisfying effects to go with the fun gameplay would be very important. We wanted the effects to really pop, even from far away.

That's why we decided on a more handdrawn approach to the various explosions, or splashes that the game will have. That will mean that the VFX will be:

• Edgeless
• Made using animated sprite sheets
• Really cool

Conclusion

Wow, that was a lot. We're very excited that with all the prototyping, researching and planning of the game pretty much out of the way, it's finally time to start the pipeline of working on the core game itself. The coming weeks will be filled with asset creation, implementation of gameplay features, and just all around a lot of cool stuff to do.

I hope to see you next week,

- The Fruut Wars team