Dear All,

For our 2nd year Group project in the second semester of DAE(Digital Arts and Entertainement) at Howest we are tasked to make a game in the timespan of one semester. We were challenged to make a fully functional couch-pvp [couch-co-op] game in an engine of our choosing, either Unreal Engine 4 or Unity,  within a timespan of 1 semester(12 weeks).  As part of this project we learn to communicate and work together with different branches of game development. Here GGP(Game Graphic Production) and GD(Game development) students. Will need to work together and combine their knowledge.

Our group consists of 6 people, 3 GGP and 3 GD.
The Members of our team are:

GGP: Duqué Geoffrey(minor Style), van der Gun Antijn (minor environments) and Van Severen Jasmijn(minor environments).

GD:  Szobel Catherine, Leirs Floris, Gesquiere Gauthier.

The Floor is Hacked!

As a Team we decided on making a PvP Twinstick Shooter where the goal is to shoot the floor to make the opponent fall through. There will be different types of ammunition to try and make your opponent fall. The ammunition can’t kill or hit the player itself.  There are different types of tiles with different toughness and shape The last man standing(literally) wins the round.

For the second week of our Game project we started to look into the art bible for the game and looking into which engine would be best to use for our core mechanics.
At week 2 we chose to focus on unreal engine and his possibilities and maybe shortcomings.

The first thing we needed to agree on was the theme for our Twinstick Shooter awesomeness, our initial idea was to work with a slime mechanic where the tiles would erode and be destroyed by the goo the player shoots. But After making different mood boards we decided on a Vaporwave theme for our game. With this change came some changes to our initial ideas. We where thinking to make the resource  computer virus based. These viruses make the floor/tile glitch and disappear,  Because the tile is glitched this tile would  make the players slow down or speed them up,  invert their movements and much more. We are very excited to work on this theme!

During Prototyping in Unreal engine 4 we figured out how we best tackle the shooting the tiles mechanic. We found it would be cool that the resource we shoot has a downfacing force to it which makes it bend downwards after shooting too reach our goal to shoot the floor. We also played around with different camera angles and movement speeds to see what would fit the game the best.

QUESTION 1:

We had to figure out how we would make different maps, because if the map would always be just squares it would be boring.  So we had to find a way to fix this. By already making it so the dimensions of the map change every time you play was a good idea. After this we decided to make the tiles in different shapes, we also had something in mind to have different height levels in the map.  

QUESTION 2:

Because we answered question 1 with different shapes of tiles, this means we cant just place them next to each other like we would with squared tiles. So we need to find way to structure the tiles in a way so were not skipping certain tiles. We will just make it so the structures are based on squares and so we can use the same strategy of just placing the different tiles next to each other like squares.

QUESTION 3:

With the shooting mechanic we now have that the player doesn't really know how far he will shoot. So we thought maybe the player has to charge his shot, the longer you hold the button  the further you shoot, also in this way the character can't just spam.

QUESTION 4:

Then again something we wanted in question1 height difference,

Instead of just having some structures that are bigger then other we could add layers of tiles, we then create it so the game is a little bit longer because you won't immediately fall off. And there will be height difference. 

We started creating a Tech document for the Project, and therefore we needed to decide on naming conventions.
we chose postfixes for naming convection combined with a Capital letter to start off after each _.

Examples:

_MX for materials for VFX.

_Tex_N; _Tex_M; _Tex_AO;  for Textures.

SM (static mesh); SkM(skeletal meshes) for Meshes. 

Sh for shaders and Sg for shader graphs.

We played around with Shaders in Unreal Engine to represent the Vaporwave feeling we where looking for (need a more elaborate research question related to this or a new one). 

Coming weeks we are planning to research the same and answer more questions in Unity. After this we will decide on which engine fits our needs the best. We will try out our core game mechanics further in prototypes (Unreal or Unity). We will also finalize our Art bible and Tech document for our project.

See you guys next week for more development update from the whole team!