Week 02

Here we are again, welcome! This week we did a lot more prototypes but this time we focused more on the main mechanics of our game. We have made game prototypes to make our mechanics more fun. We have also made art prototypes that helped us figure out what kind of aesthetic weare going for and what details we want to pay attention too. 

We also wrote a lot of documentation for our game. This includes out Techdoc, our Art Bible, our Game Design Model, ... A lot of writing in other words but it helped us work out this game idea and add more details to the original idea.

Next to that, we officially have a name for our game! Our pirate boat game is called...

Pi-rat Plunder !!

Code

Boat  Movement

We are coming towards the end of our prototyping. This means that we should start building a prototype that combines our main mechanics so we can find out how they interact with eachother. This is quite a bit of work, because all our protypes contain dirty code that isn't made to be be reworked in other projects. The biggest mechanic that would be tested with this was the boat movement because it interacts with almost all our other mechanics. Our old movement was instant, didn't account for velocity or rotation. It was just a moving box The new version tries to simulate boat movement, to move somewhere you need to face that direction. So turning becomes a big deal. But the payoff for making a sharp turn is that you will lose a lot of you velocity. So managing turning and you velocity becomes a big deal for our Pi-rats

Boat Disembarkment

We have also tested out the boat disembarkment so that the players are able to leave their boat behind and explore the islands on the screen! Currently the player isable to "jump" out of the boat and roam the islands and the treacherous seas too! I have done this prototype with a quick collision box added to the boat so that the player/pirate pawn has space to spawn on the map and do its thing.

Buoyancy Demo

We have also worked on a small prototype to test out buoyancy in Unreal Engine.  We want our game to feel like you are really sailing on an open ocean so having approriate buoyancy is very important for our game. We did some research on this topic and concluded that Unreal Engine fitted most with the buoyancy system we have in mind. Unreal has some cool plug-ins that you can easily add to any project to create realistic buoyancy physics. After tweaking some of the parameters, we had a boat that was floating!

Art

Shaders

We started of the week by prototyping the shader that was used in the game Obra dinn to get a feeling if it could work with our game, however we decided against using it since it does not fit the overall aesthetic of the game. The water shader looks better now as well, just the foam around the islands and the boat need to work. We managed to find a nice looking hatching shader on the Fab marketplace for unreal engine that really gets the job done. The big wave has a bit more geometry now and has a texture running across it making it look like proper waves.

Level UI

We needed some UI prototypes so we can better imagine how it would look like ingame, where would each player see their collected coins, where are their items displayed etc. The same was done with multiple menu and setting UIs to get a better idea of how it would/could look like. 

Level Blockout

This is a mockup of what the main gameplay scene will look like! We've added a nasty wave at the bottom of the screen, to give our pi-rats more of an incentive to keep moving! We're still finetuning shaders and effects, but we hope this gives you a good idea of what we're going for.

Particle System

In terms of particles, it's essential to go along our 2D map style and use hand-drawn masked textures, with baked-in outlines. Translucency can be used only for fading out, as soft silhouettes don't really mesh well with our style.

Art Bible

Artbible continues! 

We're diving into details now! This week we worked on the color palette, explained the shape language and figured out different proportions. We also gave a better explanation on how we're going to tackle texturing and shaders.