Week 01

Introductions    

Hello and welcome to our game project!

Our group consists of three programmers, Tagni, Victor and Maritte and three artists Mads, Natalia and Liam.

The core idea of the game we are planning to make is a Pirate Party game! You sail around on a map, collected loot and golden coins, trying to be the one who finished the race with the most golden coins. These precious, golden coins are found on islands scattered around the map. Be the first one to reach the treasure or battle it out with your opponent, on sea or on land!  But be careful, those who stay too long on the island, might see their boat drift away...

For our first devlog, we are going to guide you through the first steps we have taken to create this project! We are going to talk about some initial prototypes and the art bible we’ve been designing. These prototypes helped us answer some research questions we had set up for this week and give us a clearer view on what worked and what did not.

Coding

Unreal 5.5 vs Unity 6

For this week’s prototypes, we had decided to focus more on prototyping in Unreal because most of the programmers had some experience in Unity and we wanted to test Unreal C++ out. So, our findings, after struggling a lot... Unreal has a difficult learning curve, which makes it harder for beginners to start in this engine, but the engine already comes with a lot of built-in features. This makes Unreal more plug-and-play while in Unity you need to implement these features from scratch. On the other hand, it is quite difficult to set up these Unreal plug-ins correctly from the start.

Currently, we have not decided on a preferred engine for our project. Both Unreal and Unity have their pros and cons, but it is not clear what engine fits our project the best.

Boat Movement

This week, we focused on how to boat movement will work for our game. Our goal was to create a system that feels like a realistic boat sailing on sea/water, so we started testing in Unreal engine. Since Unreal is a very physics-based engine, we were able to create natural boat-like movement. This means that the boat can make turns and can accelerate based on player input. Implementing this in Unreal was relatively straightforward by simply adding a force to the player pawn. Doing this simulates the desired motion for our boat!

Unity offers an easy way to implement a movement/sailing system that would fit our needs. There are still a few bugs with this prototype. Using the Line Renderer component we could easily implement a simple hooking system that offers good visual feedback.

Aiming

 Aiming is an important part of our game. The projectile items used in the boat will depend on a fun, challenging way to aim. There are a lot of ways to aim: shoot in front of yourself, shoot to the side's or shoot freely with the other thumbstick. The size of the bullets also matters a lot to make hitting things more or less difficult. When prototyping, we instanly noticed that the movement influences the shooting a lot. When using velocity based movement where turning around takes some time, aiming being tied to your orientation becomes a lot harder. So we will need to workout a prototype with the movement types and the aiming types together.

Art

Hatching Shader

The main thing that concerned us about the hatching shader was how it would work and how it would look in our game

• How would the hatching shader work and look in our game

I started out by doing some research on the internet and on YouTube about what known methods are used for shaders like this and how they can be achieved.

The hatching shader works by applying it to the post process material in the post process volume. It can be set up with as many hatching textures as you want to create different results and is straight forward to work with. Different color curves within Unreal Engine are used to define which of the hatching shaders will be used in which shadow strength. The texture of the meshes will still be shown normally.

How would a rolling world shader look with the project? would it help clear up the screen or make it more unreadable?

A rolling world shader helps give the gameplay a unique look that makes the gameplay more readable, and it works with both horizontal and vertical orientations. It does add the challenge that models need to have enough vertices or else they get visibly distorted.

What happens when players get obscured by geometry? how do we make sure they stay visible?

An X-ray shader keeps all the boats and their orientation visible, and with color coding the player instantly knows which boat is which. There is a hard coded order of importance when the ships overlap, but we don't think that matters too much as boats usually won't be close to each other a lot.

How do we make sure the ships don't look too static?

 A simple wind vertex animation for the sails isn't too distracting and still gives the impression of life. only thing to keep in mind is to have a constant wind direction.

Art bible plans

Because it's a treasure hunt game, we took lots of inspiration from the old treasure maps. Textured, warm toned paper with hand drawn information. We want to have a 3d game with a 2d feel, to achieve that we will handpaint the environment and use a hatching shader to stylize the game even more.