Devlog#2:Prototype

General

The major decisions we made are that we have chosen a sci-fi theme, and will build our game in Unreal Engine 4.27.2 in C++. We also finished our tech doc and art bible, so our vision of the game is much better defined. 

Characters

We iterated further on the original 2D concepts we had. We decided to go with the designs of robots that were based on primitive shapes, making different players easier to distinguish. 

While designing the square character we thought about the softness of its edges.

We decided to go with the middle one because we wanted it to be pretty soft, but also have a readable sillhouette. The character to the right was too sharp and didn't fit our art style that well, and the character on the left was too round to the point that it was hard to spot the difference between it and the spherical robot.

 Whilst making the spherical character we felt that a standard sphere didn't really have enough character. So we took the model into Zbrush and pushed it around a bit to get in  some variation. This improved the design quite a bit.

 For the player colors and how we determine the teams we had 2 main options: 

1) a sphere team vs cube team and give them all a different color:

2) we had the option where we do blue vs red team and in each team has a cube and a sphere character:

To have a more readable contrast between the two teams, we decided to go with option 2.

 We also changed some things from our orignal concept, e.g the 'teeth'. We preferred the cuter look without them, and it gives a character an all round consistent colour palette. 

 Environment

 While designing the room we thought about how we could make this arena less boring. We implemented some elavation at the center, and a slope towards the building areas. We also created a holographic button in the middle where all players need to stand on to start the game. Finally, we put some big props and some details like small pipes and vents to break up the boring flat areas.

Blocks

We made some 3D blocks of varying shapes to put in our prototype build. We were inspired by Tetris' blocks, but also tried out blocks that extrude in multiple directions.

We also made a base 3D model for our special blocks. To make them  stand out from regular blocks, each one makes use of emissive, opacity, or metallness. 

Power-ups

We began designing the power-up pickups and played around with the emissive value of the edges. This made them stand out from the rest of the arena. The symbols needed to be both simple and readable. The edges of the power-ups are quite sharp, however, due to the camera placement and the size of these pick-ups, shamfering them makes no visual difference and only increases poly count.

Programming

This week we finished our 3 major prototypes: punching, enemy stun by block, and block spawning. For the punching and stun, we looked into how animations in Unreal work. We placed a collision box on the hands of the character that activate whenever the player punches. It follows the animation and generates a collision event with enemies, causing them to be stunned.

Next, we looked deeper into one of the special blocks: the bomb block. We modified it so that players can pick them up and throw them. We also tested out different explosion forces, because the player could abuse the explosion and reach the finish quickly by being launched by it. They could even be tossed out of the map entirely. We found a balanced force strength that pushes the blocks and players enough for them to be launched, but not strong enough that they can fly extremely high or far.

 Finally, we brought all prototypes together in one main build, complete with a level blockout. All the major mechanics are added.

What's next?

With preproduction finished, the programmers can start working on a definitive build using C++. The artists can start modelling the blocks and characters in more detail, as well as make a polished level.