Devlog 1: Research

Introduction

Dear visitor, welcome to the first devlog of Trash Pandas! This is a project of five Howest DAE students for the course Group Projects.

Our group consists of two programmers, Dylan and Maxim and three artists, Anna, Julian and Joe. Together we aim to make an awesome pvp game. We would love to tell you more about that in this devlog!

The setting of the game will be raccoons trying to steal trash from a house. The raccoon that ends up with the most collected trash will win the game. They will need to overcome lots of dangers to do so. One of the biggest dangers will be the other players. They can slap you with their trashbag and so you will lose some trash which the attacker can then steal.

In this devlog we will focus on the researching aspect. Since good researching is crucial we took our time to test several things. This variates from the art style to the mechanics to the engine that is being researched.

Art

style

For our art style we have chosen to go for a nice cartoony art style! We saw that this art style really fits the style of our game and also reaches the same game audience. Our artist have also been really busy on creating a very nice first version of our artbible and putting some nice things together.

Pipeline

For our render pipeline we had the choice between the built in renderer, the universal render pipeline and the HDRP. We thought that the built in renderer would be a bit too basic for our project. We also wouldn’t need it to be too advanced so that leaves the HDRP out as well. We chose the Universal render pipeline, since we thought this would fit our project the best. Since the pipeline comes with some extra features like the shader graph and decals and lots of resources on celshading, we decided that this render pipeline would be the best.

Level layout

The layout of our level will be a very important aspect of our game to make it interesting. That is why we have also experimented with this as well. We have tested how the general layout would be for a room in the house. We would like to let the player have some vertical movement, lots of horizontal manoeuvrability and lots of obstacles to overcome. This can be a big challenge to balance perfectly, so that’s why it is very importantly to test this in advance.

Programming

Unity vs unreal

One big decision was the choise of game engine. The group was very divided on being pro Unity or pro UE4. We are going to make a small game with not too complicated graphics. This alone is asking for Unity as our engine. Our developers also thought that the development time in Unreal engine would take longer than in Unity. They were very interested in learning to work with Unreal but because of the tight time schedule, it would be a too steep learning curve to learn cpp in Unreal in this short amount of time. That’s why we decided to play it safe and go for Unity this time. We are very confident that we are able to do everything we want in Unity!

Main mechanic

Our main mechanic will be the players slapping each other with the bags. We will need some carefull and extensive prototyping to achieve a good balance in this. The main concern is that the players will abuse this mechanic to keep on winning. We want to add some complexity to this where it can also have a negative influence to attack your enemy. How we will do this exactly will become clear during the prototyping fase.

Main Mechanic implementation

When player 1 attacks player 2, player 2 will lose some items in his bag. That results in the bag of player 2 becoming less valuable and less heavy. Because the bag of player 2 is less heavy now, he is able to move faster as wel. How many items he loses will depend on the weight on the bag of player 1. We will need some testing on how many items a player should lose when he gets hit.

Another aspect of getting hit will be a stun. The attacked player will not be able to move for a brief moment. How big this effect will be will also get more clear during prototyping.

Coming week

The focus of our developers will be mainly prototyping. They will work hard to provide a playable  demo that roughly shows the main mechanics of Trash pandas. Our artists will keep on working on the artbible, as well as doing multiple iterations on the level.