Team [Group24]

Hello and welcome, netizens. This is our first entry for our ambitious project (which is currently called TempName). Obviously it will change in the near future.

We are 5 students from Howest DAE/ Digital-Arts-and-Entertainment (Belgium).  Our team consists of two very talented programmers, Leen and Nicolas, two exceptional artists, Valeria and Kobe, and yours truly Patrick who is in charge of everything audio related (and also the devlog because I like yapping).

Project details

The 5 W's and an H

What?

We are aiming to create a couch co-op game which offers a glance over the process of making a game in a small team, simplified and gamified with comedic undertones. 

Who?

The players take the unique roles of an Artist and a Programmer (and in a future update more roles could be introduced, such as a sound designer)

How?

By collaborating together, managing and dividing tasks and making important relevant decisions for your game (in-game) the players get to work for 5 minutes and based on their performance, failed/succeeded tasks and much more factors they release a game (in-game) and they get the results of their work.  A very important aspect of our game is that based on the decisions you make about the game you are making (in-game) the actual game you are playing (as a player) changes dynamically, changing art and sound.

Why?

Our idea, pitched by our beloved artist Valeria, came spontaneously, maybe even as a joke, but the moment we've heard it we scraped all the other concepts we've had and started embracing this one. I think we really resonated with this one because we get to explore quite an unique idea and also cope with the stress of this course by making virtue of necessity. Gamifying our experiences as actual game developers and providing a small window into our lives but in a fun way, accessible to the broader public.

Where?

The level design is going to be inspired by ye' olde' game studio offices and also our actual surroundings (which is also in a way, a game studio office), so we can have a truly meta experience!

When?

NOW!

Concepts

In the current build, there is a small Unity prototype on the AI movement but most of the things mentioned will be included over the future builds

Art

For our style approach, we have decided to approach it from a simple, low-poly and cute way. Since this really enhances the delivery we want to have and due to time limitations. With smart-use of texture-swapping and shaders our Artists have created a system which will allow us to really make our game dynamic.

Code

Our coders worked tirelessly to create multiple prototypes in both Unreal and Unity to compare and choose what suits us best. We have looked at how fast we can work in the engine, how good it handles asset-swapping, optimization when it came to rendering shaders and such...
As of now, there are multiple prototype projects each including separate mechanics which will be sewn together once we make a final decision and create a main project which will then be uploaded weekly to our itch.io page!

Audio

As of now, audio-wise most of it was research and references for audio and music, creating a sonic moodboard from which together with the rest of the team a decision will be made regarding the direction of the sound. Since audio is usually the last in the development pipeline (our workload grows exponentially over the course of a project) right now I am enjoying a breather, a calm before the storm which allows me to really pour my heart into administrative things such as this devlog :)

Research Questions

Engine Choice.

As mentioned before, after prototyping both engines we have deducted that Unreal suits our needs best, coming in with a lot of in-built functions that will facilitate and allow us to save time, something that is very important for us.

Asset Swapping - Is it possible and is it feasible

After testing both engines we saw that Unreal is more optimized when it comes to Asset/Texture/Sound swapping. In our prototypes we have already found ways to do it thus the answer is, yes, it is possible and it is feasible without blowing our player's computers.

Shaders

We have prototyped some shaders already as you can see in the gif below and it is definitely possible to use shaders to our advantage to make the game more diverse without putting in the tedious work of making multiple instances of objects or levels. The use of complex shaders is also one of the reason why we chose Unreal Engine 5.

Animations

To tackle one of the most time consuming processes , we have researched on how to make the animations in the most efficient way possible. Using Mixamo we can use the auto-rigger to our advantage. There are some technical aspects which we have to pay attention to with this tool though: making sure that the model has enough poly, the scale is matching the one in maya, has limbs... We also answered one of the questions we had about giving our players floating hands which will be not possible since the auto-rigger needs the model to be closed. 

Metasounds

After doing some research into the new in-built sound engine in UE5, we have decided yet again that Unreal was the better choice after seeing the amount of possibilities audio-wise. Since the use of middleware was out of question, Unity was out of question as well since their in-built audio framework is much more limited and requires a lot of self-made code, something we do not have time for. 

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