Weekly overview

Welcome again reader, to our weekly Dev-log!

Our entire team has been hard at work this week getting our game idea to a fun playable demo.

The artists have been hammering away at making character and environment art while the programmers have been focused on fine-tuning the core mechanics and combining them into a playable demo.

So let's get into the specifics, shall we.

Major decisions

Which engine did we decide on?

We won't beat around the bush: we went for Unity. This was a fairly straightforward choice for the programmers because Unreal had not been cooperating throughout the past week: code wasn't compiling, the project kept crashing and a multitude of other issues kept occurring.

At that time though, the programmers had already prototyped the core mechanics in Unity so the choice for the preferred game engine was an easy one in the end, albeit not ideal for the artists because of them having more experience in Unreal. But the artists were still very excited to learn the workflow of Unity and get to make some awesome art.

Which theme did we choose?

The theme we found was most fitting for our fast-paced tower-platformer game was as follows:

You and your friends play as hamsters in hamster-balls. You grapple and bounce your way to the top of a tower-like hamster cage in order to escape it before your friends do. While all that is happening, there’s a hungry cat slowly crawling up, trying to snatch you, so you have to be quick to get to the top!

We will elaborate more on the chosen theme in the art section below.

Which mechanics did we push through?

The final prototype we made consisted of all the following core mechanics:
- Grappling;
- Bouncing;
- Death mechanic (volume slowly moving up);
- Smooth camera behavior following all players and zooming out based on player positions;
- Scoring system.

More elaborate explanations about each mechanic can be found in the programming section below.

Art

Cel-shading but watercolors

Once we decided upon which engine to use, the first cel-shader iteration was further developed. Now it's not just able to fully detect any type of light but can paint shadows with a beautiful watercolor effect. This Watercolor-Cel-Shader right now can elaborate light in 2 levels: light and shadow. 

Cast shadows are still in development to unify the look.

Model and textures by Gianmarco: https://sketchfab.com/GianmArt

Model and textures by Sakibe Van Soest: https://skfb.ly/6ZOLN

UI&Menus

We have started sketching out menus and working on possible UI configuration models.

Theme

Our little mammals:

Color Palettes

We explored color palettes and reached a final color scheme that will be our color main guideline throughout the development.

Here are our colors!

Obstacles

This week we've made mock-ups of the different obstacles we think would fit best in our game:

Modular Roulette

The modular roulette is a spinning wheel with 4 access holes for players to enter it. It spins around its center pivot point. Players have to maneuver through it to reach the next room. Thus players can’t always speedrun towards the top of the tower.

Seesaw

The seesaw is exactly what the name implies: a seesaw. It’s a plank with a center joint which makes it spin whenever players come in contact with it. The spinning plank can hit a player to block the path they intended to go on which slows them down. Players can also spin a seesaw and intentionally (or unintentionally) block other players’ paths.

Rail-Platforms

This obstacle functions as an elevator carrying 2 platforms onto which the players can grapple to be able to reach the top of the room. We can make different variations for this platform-carrying rail system to also make some differently shaped ones. This obstacle makes it so that players can reach the next room faster by using the elevator because if they don’t, they would have to scale the walls which is more difficult and time-consuming.

Double Forks

These double forked obstacles work the same way as the seesaw obstacle: with a center joint around which they can rotate. The only difference is they rotate by themselves, just like the roulette obstacle. These also function to block the players’ paths resulting in the players not just speedrunning to the top in one go.

Turrets

The turrets are enemy entities that shoot bouncy or spiky balls to nearby players. The bouncy balls push players in a certain direction which messes with their movement and the spiky balls either deflate or do damage to the players. This adds to the learning curve of the game for some extra complexity.

What's Next?

In engine set up:

• Block out levels/rooms
  
• UI implementation
  

Props & Characters:

• Finalize concepts
• Start modeling
• Create textures (gradients and tileable detailed)

Programming

What have the programmers done this week?

Updated and refined Grappling Mechanic

The grappling mechanic has been fully updated to incorporate both the "grapple anywhere" feature, which was our baseline for this mechanic, and the lock-on feature in one! This works by having the "grapple anywhere" feature active by default. When the left shoulder on a connected gamepad is pressed, the grapple mechanic switches to the lock-on feature. A separate script then evaluates all valid grapple points based on a certain range from the player.

Besides having both versions of the grapple mechanic in one now, we also added another (really fun) feature: grappling other PLAYERS. This works by holding down the right shoulder on your gamepad and this locks onto nearby players instead of grapple-points. Grappling to other players results in you being swung towards them, but they also get pulled back towards you. This adds a fun way to mess with each other.

Death Mechanic

The idea we have for the (currently red trigger volume as seen in the gifs above) death mechanic, is a 2D cat, slowly crawling up the tower with the intention to kill the players. A player hit by this cat dies and gets respawned at the next, safe, respawn point in the tower.

This works by having a respawn point at a safe spot in each room in the tower. As soon as a player dies because of a collision with the death volume, the next safest respawn spot is searched for and used to respawn the dead player. By dying because of this volume, the player gets a death penalty which eventually subtracts a certain amount of points from their end-score.

Camera Behaviour

The camera behavior is still a work-in-progress to decide on which type of movement behavior is the best one to reach the most fun form of gameplay.

Currently, the camera behavior works by calculating the centroid based on all player positions. It uses that centroid as its own position. It then zooms out based on the distance between the highest and lowest players. As soon as a player reaches the finish, that player gets ignored by the camera and it resets itself to only focus on the remaining players.

Finished Bounciness

This is the other core mechanic that completes the main gameplay. The bounciness mechanic adds a more chaotic touch to the general player movement. This makes it so that the players also have to take into account where they will bounce towards when they swing across the level, trying to reach the top of the tower.

This mechanic also makes it so that when you grapple a player and pull them against yourself, you can send them flying across the room, which makes for some fun gameplay.

Scoring System

This week we implemented a scoring system. The base scores of the players are calculated based on the position they finish in. A penalty is deducted from the players’ base score based on the number of times they died, by remaining too low in the level, times a base penalty amount. The scores are calculated and shown as soon as all players finish the level.

What's next?

At this moment, we have reached the end of the Prototyping stage. All that is left for us to do before Production starts, is to list all of the future tasks in our backlog so we can easily get started on working on our actual game next week.

After this week, we have learned a great deal about implementing our core mechanics and which art style we want to go for which fits our game best.

We are all very excited to hop into the Production phase with the knowledge that we have acquired up until now and we hope you are too!

See you next week!