At the start of this week our group had chosen one of our ideas to work further on. During our meeting with our coaches however it became clear that the idea we had chosen had grown too much for our project scope, and questions were raised about how fun the core mechanic was and how unique it would be in the end. (A lot of people are apparently taking 'vertical slice to mean, move vertically upwards')

Together with our coaches we went trough our other ideas and decided on two we had initially not chosen to research, Raccoon Rumble a game where players would control 2 ends of their body separately and collect as much trash as possible, and Cube Brawler a game where you must knock your opponents off a level, as it changes beneath your feet, giving you advantages or disadvantages.

Programmers:

We had our hands full this week. We decided to split up the work we had and each research the feasibility & fun factor for one game idea. Miguel took on the challenge of making Raccoon Rumble in Unreal and I worked on Cube Brawler in Unity.

Miguel started working on Raccoon Rumble by tackling the biggest task first, the player’s body. In Raccoon Rumble the player can move the head and the tail of the raccoon they play as independently, while the body stretches somewhat between the two ends. He later implemented a proper blockout 3D mesh for the raccoon's body, modeled by Alex.

Next up was implementing the trash the players must collect to score points. Said trash can vary in size and weight, as well as shape - alternating between the 3 different blockout meshes that were modeled until now. Then the nests the trash must be deposited in, since if raccoons carry a lot of trash at once, they become very slow. Then, to add some final touches, various visual cues and other player feedback were added. After that he finished his week by working on our tech doc, though since we don’t have one game concept chosen right now only general information has been put in so far.

For Cube Brawler, I started off this week by making the player movement as well. In the original idea for the Cube Brawler game, we had each player control a car so that’s what I started with, but we might change this later! Implementing some simple car like movement wasn’t very difficult.

Next, I threw out the old Unity input system and upgraded to the new since it supports local multiplayer much better and is overall just a better system. It took me a little bit of time to get to know the new input system and how it worked. But by the end I had a nice local multiplayer setup which can take input from gamepads or the keyboard.

Finally, the level in Cube Brawler changes terrain every so often, so I made the floor beneath the players into a cube and set it to rotate every 30 seconds, during which the players float upward. As a finishing touch I added some trails to the players to make their movement more visible, and touched up some values in the movement code, though it might need some more tweaking.

Artists:

This week our artists were mostly busy discussing and finding reference for the style our game was going to have. Along with making some simple models for the programmers to use in their research prototypes.

Alex kicked off this week by doing concept work for our ideas. While we were still considering our initial idea, they drew some mock screenshots for it. After that they added style ideas to the collaborative PureRef file to figure out the visuals for the game. Lastly they modeled some temporary assets for the Raccoon Rumble prototype.

Stijn modeled a car mesh for the cube brawler prototype and along with Alex & Beau worked on the mood board. After he worked out a chosen style in Unreal on a small asset to see how the Unreal engine would make the game look using our style.

Beau spent most of his time looking for art references for the mood board of our game, finding reference for the models, lighting and texturing we might want to use. He also spent time sketching concepts for the cube brawler game.

That was all for this week! Next week another member of the team will report on our progress during the 3rd week of our project during which we’ll choose one prototype to further develop into a full prototype of our game!

- Daphné