Hi ! Another week has passed and more progress has been made. As you may have noticed our game finally has a name ! The ideas from last week (Raccoon Rumble & Cube Brawler) have evolved to Fish Fiasco.

After last week's meeting with our coaches, we noticed they shared our enthousiasm for the Cube Brawler game but the rotating aspect of the cube was questioned. Maybe getting rid of the random rotations and giving the players more control over this could make the game more fun and engaging for the players. "Maybe we could just have the cube tilt and have the players slide off if the slope is too steep." After another round of brainstorming we ended up with Fish Fiasco, a game where 2-4 players (fishermen this time, no more cars) try to push eachother off a tilting ice plate. Instead of the changing environments impacting the gameplay we came up with different powerups under the form of fishes who randomly will jump out of the water.

Programmers:

Since we decided to change up our initial ideas, that meant our existing prototypes (Raccoon Rumble & Cube Brawler) needed to be replaced by a prototype that actually represents the game we will be making. Since Daphné made the Cube Brawler prototype, she decided to take care of this prototype as well since both games are pretty similar.

Daphné split her time this week between making the prototype and working on the tech doc. First a movement system was implemented so our players could move around the level & get input from multiple controllers and adding players once they do any input. After this she added the dashing to the movement system and went through 3 different iterations of picking up the spawned fish. After that the actual powerups were implemented (pufferfish and electric eel). No scoring system was implemented yet as this is still just the prototyping phase. Next the tilting of our level based on the centre of mass of our players was added, along with a round timer, models for the visuals of the fish, making different players have different colours and fine tuning the movement values of the players to have it be slippery enough but still feel good to control.

The remainder of her work this week was spent on writing the Game Tech Doc.

Miguel spent this week on a lot of paperwork and more logistically oriented tasks. A lot of this was in HacknPlan (the project planner tool we’re using for this project). He started planning out our production phase by splitting our concept into objective elements (around 50 different elements). Each of these elements then got a thorough description so everyone on the team will be able to easily envision every portion of the game. After this our workload was divided into separate tasks (each linked to the previously mentioned elements), along with writing descriptions and time estimates for each of these tasks.

Along with all the HacknPlan work, he also implemented a bit of visual player feedback in the prototype (making the fish pickups flash red, and turning the players white when dashing), and went over the Game Tech Doc Daphné wrote and changed/re-wrote some portions.

Artists:

For the artist, our main focus this week was on the Artbible. This is what will be guiding our artstyle throughout the rest of the project so this is a very important document to have properly finished at this stage of the project.

Alex started compiling references and organizing specific moodboard elements that inspired our visual style. After that they started writing and formatting the Artbible, aiming for a layout that fits the mood and theme of our game, a fishing village. After that they also drew some mockups to get a better feel for the possible finished product - including an animation keyframe of the fisherman belly gong, sketches of the full map and some UI and FX elements. These drawings are not only used in the Artbible itself, but also in the GDM, to provide reference for what we are working towards.

Beau did a lot of sketching and mockups for some of the potential animations and mechanics. He also made a blockout of our fisherman in zbrush to further help visualizing the style we are going for.

Finally what I did this week. Firstly I wrote the weekly meeting document from our meeting with our coaches. After that I made a few quick placeholder meshes for our 2 fish powerups (a pufferfish and an electric eel). These are very basic but are just there to capture the idea of what these powerups will look like. The rest of my time was then spent on writing the rest of the Artbible and doing this weeks itch.io devlog that you are reading right now.

And that concludes this weeks devlog and the prototyping phase of this project. Starting next week, we will start working on the game itself so plenty of things to look forward to in next weeks devlog !

-Stijn