Introduction

Hello everyone, thank you for checking out our devlog for our game project. 

Our group is made up of 2 coders, Rikki and Michiel and three artists Jordy, Eva and Michalina. The game we will create will be a local couch PvP racing game with office chairs. We are very excited to get started on it and we will try our best to make it as good as it can be. Hopefully you will stick with us for the coming weeks and join us for this ride.

The idea behind the game is a local couch PvP style racing game. You will be playing as a new employee in a fresh start up company in the process of setting up the workplace. But as you and some of your friends get bored and decide that racing on chairs around the busy environment would be a much more productive activity than helping your other less fortunate colleagues. Chaos is sure to follow. You will have to race around the office in laps and avoid as much of the obstacles as possible. This can go from coffee falling over on the track to scattered cables around the office or to your colleagues who decided now is a good time to move some desks.

For now we will take you trough our Research process and some of our questions we answered this week. Asking ourselves these questions will help focus our attention to what needs to be done and allows us to see what works and what does not. 

Art

Style

The artists will work on trying to implement the style called ''Alegria'' from 2D into 3D. We think this is a very fitting style for the kind of theme our game will have since it takes place in an office environment. This 2D style is used to describe a flat geometric art style that is usually associated with big tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The characters portraited in these illustrations have very disproportionate features such as long and bendy limbs, small torso, minimal or no facial features, and bright colors without any blending.

How will we translate this style into 3D?

In the illustrations there is a visible dithering in the shadows. So we made a quick shader with a shadow that we can adjust. Another big thing that is present in these illustrations is the outline.  

We had the idea of doing it manually onto the model because it is not really the same as the usual toon outline. The outline is only visible in places where they want to show the shape. It also has a very even thickness. So we might do everything in unlit, with hand places strokes and a small dithered shadow.  

Another option will be to have an unlit material and put a texture on the models with the shadows being already painted on it. But this will be a problem once we rotate a model. With this we would however have more control on where the shadows are. Another downside is that the assets will take longer to create, as it needs additional software. Performance wise it would also be better if we do it like this. We could just apply colors to the models instead of having a separate material per asset

In the next week we will do more research on this and determine which option will be better. 

Environment

The environment the game will take place in will be a startup office so we want our environment to reflect that by making it very messy and chaotic. We will achieve this by having a lot of desks spread around, moving boxes stacked in some places, cables laying everywhere and people moving stuff furniture the office.

Coding

Engine - Unreal Engine or Unity?

A lot of factors went into play when deciding on which engine to use.

On the visual side, Unreal Engine offers a lot of tools to make a visually stunning game, where as Unity is a more simple engine with more limited options in terms of graphics and effects. However it turns out that we don't need those fancy tools and that the style which we are going for is perfectly doable in Unity.

Programming wise, it's a similar story. Unreal makes use of both blueprints and c++ coding which is more complex but gives the user a wider range of options. Unity on the other hand, uses only c# which makes it simpler but easier to work with.

After trying both options, we came to the conclusion that Unity was the better choice for the type of game we are making, both on the art and the technical side.

What render pipeline will we use?

We will use Forward Rendering because we will use unlit shaders for a high artistic colour control. There are no additional deferred passes needed for it. We will also just use one light to ensure consistency. It is more performant with the basic shaders we used than deferred rendering and forward rendering seems to be the standard with toon shading.

Can we make the main mechanic fun?

Since our game is based on racing around an office, the racing part is obviously the main mechanic of the game. 

Racing is however not something any of us have experience with programming so it was a challenge to see whether we could make a mechanic that felt both fun and fitted into the couch co-op genre we want to achieve. After prototyping and brainstorming we have two variants of the racing mechanic. One which will focus on just applying velocity to the office chair whenever the gas button is being held down, which is the case in most modern racing games. The other variant applies a certain force on the chair in the direction you are facing, when a button gets pressed. The way you will have to aim first, then press the button to go in that direction.

Which of the two variants we are going with is yet to be decided, and will be determined after further prototyping and testing.

More updates will follow next week, see you then!