Hi everyone!

This week, we worked on brainstorming and researching the core mechanics/techniques that we plan to use in our game. The focus of the artists was mainly on cell/toon shaders, level composition, and rendering types. Meanwhile, the programmers worked on movement and local multiplayer in both Unity and Unreal engines.

The week started with a presentation by our teachers, where we learned how to use Perforce for source control, and we received information about the tasks for the upcoming weeks. The coming weeks we will be working on creating a game design document that could be used to pitch our game, and a tech document in which we will describe all the agreements, such as the software we use, rendering types, engines, and much more. 

After the presentation, we went upstairs and waited for a talk with our coordinators. Meanwhile, we started working on polishing the idea, creating a structure for the documents, and learning how to use Perforce. The talk went really well, and we received advice to first focus on the core mechanics so that they match with the emotional connection we want to give the player. Our goal is to make the players have fun with friends, but also to make them want to be the best player. To support this feeling, the best player will receive a "crown" for example. During the meeting, we were also asked to prepare some prototypes to support our researches.

For the art part, we started off by making a temporary icon for our project. We went with an egg with really buff arms. The second thing we did was research the differences between forward and deferred rendering in both Unreal and Unity. We also looked into how to create a toon shader in both engines, we're still working on getting it as close as possible to the way we want it to look. Last but not least, we created a quick layout for the arena to try out the mechanics. The setting is going to be a farm on which players fight with each other. There will be hiding spots to survive extreme weather phenomena, which may occasionally occur.

Programming Research

On the programming side, we wanted to have a clear understanding of how the movement, aiming and pickups would be handled.  While starting up we instantly noticed that there were new input systems in both engines that we weren't familiar with. The old input system from Unreal Engine is deprecated, so it would be best to avoid that.

Learning both systems, Unity easily beat out UE in terms of simplicity. It is easier to implement and it supports local multiplayer from the get-go.

Obviously local multiplayer is a big thing for us since it is the theme. Sadly it was nearly impossible to implement in UE5.1. We also had to learn the hard way that UE5 barely has any documentation around it, compared to the clean documentation of Unity.

Controller support is also a must in our game, so we had a good look at this too. And again, barely had any problems with Unity. The only problem is when you connect a PlayStation controller, it detects it as 2 controllers. But then again, UE is even worse as it took us hours to get any input on a second controller. We found out that it matters where you click "play", it could straight up not receive any input while it works when clicking "play" in another file.

Another thing we had to research was how the camera of the game would be handled. You might think this is very straightforward, and you would be partially correct. In Unity when you don't attach a camera to the prefab of the player, the camera from the scene will be used. Unlike in UE where you have to go out of your way to set the camera. There are also multiple ways to set this up, so if one tutorial doesn't work anymore, all your effort might've gone to waste since another would perhaps handle this in a entire different way.

Because of all these downsides to UE, we will be going for Unity as our main engine. And are looking forward to working with it.

During the week, we had several meetings to make sure everyone was on the correct path. We also added HackNPlan tasks and updated each other about our concerns. Even though there was a lot of researching and planning, this week went very well. We are looking forward to seeing what's next!