We are in the prototype stage and these are the questions we asked ourselves:

Q: How does the camera function in-game? Is it fun to turn it 180 degrees?

A: The camera is orthographic. It can look at the scene from 3 different angles, right, top  and left. The camera can be rotated around itself from left, right, up and upside down. When the camera has to change sides it uses a vector SLerp for position and a Quat SLerp for rotation. When the camera has to change sides from left to right or vice versa (180° rotation), it will do so by rotating and SLerp-ing to the top position. The camera will stay fixated onto the scene and unpleasant transformations will be excluded. The camera travels alongside with the players when the game progresses. There are no issues with the camera changing its position while the game is progressing. The camera movement works exactly the same in unreal as in unity, but the function for a FVector SLerp had to be made because there wasn’t a standard implementation for it.

Q:how does the random field generation work?

A:Field Generation has been tested in Unreal, but proved to be a challenge due to the lack of experience with the engine and it didn't give the results we wanted. A second version has been tested in unity and seemed promising. This system worked with block of 1 unit and generated the floor and empty spaces in between them. This has been redone with sections of 5 units. The level is spawned on the fly through a combination of states (floor up , floor down or both) and weights (how big is the chance an obstacle will spawn) and erased outside the playfield.

Q:how are we going to implement the movements of the players?

A:Exercise velocity when pressed, jump on each other = force down. Delayed destroy so you can still jump on the other person. Built in collision from unity. Raycasts( =checking if the player is present on a certain radius) Not running against each other+watch if a head jump occurs+do a bounce with head jump. Double jump and dash implementation. Look if there is a headjump. Easy to assign controllers.

Q: Unity vs Unreal (programmers point of view)

A: (Ruben personal opinion)

Unreal: Unreal looks scary and overwhelming when you open it for the first time. While working in this engine, you get used to ‘expose’ all of your functions and variables to blueprints quite fast. Unreal is the better engine for artists who are interested in designing levels and adjusting weights for functions through the power of blueprints. There are a lot less community guides to be found about the implementation of c++, but there is a lot of information about blueprints.

Unity: The entry level of unity is quite low. Everyone who knows a little bit about programming (C++, C#, Java,...) can create a script and add its functionality to a gameobject. There are guides or video tutorials about almost everything that you can create in unity.

Q: How will the game look? (Artbible)

A: We researched some concepts and came to the conclusion of low poly flat shaded art. It can give nice results and is fun to make for a cartoony styled game. Then we wrote down the main principles of the art style in our art bible. It focuses mostly on polygonal shapes and rectangular shapes. The setting will be medieval and fits our game perfectly. We’re decided that the colors of our background will be desaturated in comparison with our foreground. The game will be all about chaos and we don’t want that our players will lose sight of themselves (too often). That’s why our foreground will consist of very saturated colors that will catch the eye fast enough. The game will make enemies out of your closest friends while playing it! we’ve also discussed the shapes of all of our elements.  We’ll update this question further next week when we completed the art bible.

These are the questions we asked ourselves this week and more are upcoming next week:

Q: Invulnerability + RFX (testing in Unity and Unreal)

Q: How will the game look? (Update)

-> HUD/UI

-> Special RFX

-> Composition

-> Lighting

Q: How do you implement art in an engine (Unreal vs Unity)

Q: How can we optimize level generation to work smoother

A: At the moment the level sections are created and destroyed all the time, this could be done in a more efficient way using an object pool. for next week We would like to try this out.