Introduction

Welcome back to the third installment of our development log for the "FruutWars" game we are developing.
We're very excited to show what we've been working on, and what we will be working on in these coming weeks, as the development fase of our project has officially begun! That means thing are going to start happening, and they're going to start happening fast. 

First of all, let's talking about the behind-the-scenes of the whole thing, the programming:

Programming

Various mechanics

This week we were able to get a ton of stuff done. We Translated everything from the blueprint prototype to C++ and started working on the framework of our game. We managed to make base classes for the player’s character, weapons, projectiles, player controllers and made a health component that could be placed on any object making it possible to take damage from projectiles and being able to die.

We made all of these classes very flexible, they are able to be inherited into blueprint actors and have their components be changed manually. This means that if we wanted to make 2 different projectiles that look completely different with different abilities we would be able to easily do that by just changing some variables and connecting some visuals. We also started working on the loot crate system component, which when attached to an object, will have a chance to spawn a weapon or power-up.

The chances of those can also be easily changed with the blueprint implementation, meaning that we could make different types of loot crates/chest/barrels each having their unique drop table.

Here's some of the gameplay features we've been working on. You can see the player spawning, picking up weapons and destroying level objects.

In-game UI

We also started working a bit on the main menu and got a basic system going with some animations and menu states (Titlescreen, Selection menu, Options, etc). This means almost the entire UI will soon be done, which is completed by the fact that the artists have been hard at work at creating a nice look for the user interface.

Art

On the more visual side of things, we're starting the first week of the development fase off with a bang.

User Interface

First off all, take a look at the UI Design our artist has been working hard on this week:

Many of the other UI elements have been designed as well, but here's a collection of some of our favourites. The look and feel of the game is really coming together now!

As awesome as these designs are (and we agree with you, they are), keep in mind that these are simply proof of concept and haven't been implemented into the game yet, or represent what the game would ultimately look like. That will be the case with many of the things we'll be doing these first weeks, as in the beginning stages of any game many things can change.

Assets

Something else we've been working on is getting the designs of our necessary assets down, and starting work where we can to get this game in a good shape as soon as possible. One of these are the various weapons we'll have in the game. As it was most important to have some starting weapon so we can start testing how that would look and, more importantly, play, we started working on that first.

Which is why we started with some concept art of different weapons we could have as our base starting weapon ( the one that all players would start with). We chose two favourites out of this mix, and ended up settling for the fruit cannon.

And quickly after that we came up with a good, fitting model for it as well! This will be ready to be implemented into the game in the coming build, after which we will start texturing the weapon as well.

Character

Lastly, we've been working on our first playable character: the loveable grumpy Comissioner Potato!

We begun this daunting task with creating some concept art to finalize the design of the character, and get an eye for some of the details that his final model would and look would entail.

While we think both designs are good, we ended up going for the second, more exaggerated look to fit better with the theme of the game.

We're pretty happy with this result, and while his look may still change over the course of development we are now confident that we can do him justice in the coming weeks. Modelling this character has therefore already started, although it's too early to show anything yet.

Conclusion

And that's it for this week! With the development fase well and truly on it's way, we're excited to really get this game going, and we can't wait to show what else we have in store the coming weeks.

See you next week,

The Fruut Wars team.