So it begins

Just as stated in this glorious quote from King Theoden in Helm's Deep , so today does our glorious journey begin.

We are just a humble group of 5 adventurous Game Developers who were given a monumental task to make a  game together.

As for our members we have 5 core members. 2 Programmes Siebe Boeckx and Wieme Jarne. 3 Artists Esteban Munoz Celis, Tomas Vankersschaever ,Matej Bakši. Together we plan on delivering you a quite exciting brawler game inspired by old school 80s/90s fighting games.

This premise sounds simple yet it has a slight twist to it. The combat itself is heavily movement based as all the players will be in possession of a grappling hook. Thanks to this you'll be able to swing around our platform based arena and get a speed bonus to your attacks. Simple as that isn't it ?! 

 In the end the players earn points for kills, the one that has the most in the end is the winner 😀.

So far we set up several research questions for us to answer this week. These questions will help you to see our progress and the thought process behind the development of our project, but they'll also help us to know what worked and what didn't, what we should pursue further and what to let be.

To keep our structure clean we've decided to split these updates into two sections one is an Art section and the other Coding section.   

Art

Art style 

For the arstyle itself we wanted to create something quite unique, one of the first ideas and the one that stuck the most was an intriguing combination of 2D and 3D. That being classical 2D pixel art characters moving in 3D environments. That automatically brought up questions: how do we want to achieve this iconic pixel art look in our game ? The decision was made so far to create hand painted pixel art questions which would later get a bit of a PBR treatment in substance painter.

However we are still experimenting with this workflow and it still might be a subject up to change 

Rendering Pipeline

This was quite an interesting one to solve as not many of us knew much about rendering pipelines prior to this project. Tutorials were watched, documentations read and tests of our own were being made. 

So far we chose the deferred rendering. Not only is it today's industry standard but the artStyle we are working on right now will be quite color and light focused, as we plan on having quite a variety of emissive materials and additional light sources in our scenes. And that's where the deferred rendering truly shines. 

Coding

Unreal vs unity

Our programmers worked really hard to answer this question. We have managed to get two really basic prototypes going in both engines. In the end however it was decided to go with unreal as that is the engine that managed to give us smoother better working results but also it is the engine that is the most familiar with the majority of our team. 

Basic controls

So we had an idea of gameplay and now it came to a tes with one Simple question “How do we even play this game ???” . As our characters were supposed to be able to do a vast variety of movements in all possible directions and being able to fight each other in a same time the decision came to this:

current controls are:

-moving: left stick

-aim grapple: right stick

-punch: left trigger

-shoot grapple: right trigger

-jump: A

quite simple in core but a classic once said it just work 

That will be everything from us for this week folks so see ya all in the next one!