Intro:

Hello and welcome to our project.
We are 4 students studying Digital Arts & Entertainment at Howest that are going to make a small game over the coming weeks, this log is where we will update on our progress every week so you can check in weekly to see our progress

our team exists out of 2 programmers (Elise and Robbe) and 2 artists(Jules and Nick), together we wanted to create an arcade-themed game for our course of Game Projects and after a week of brainstorming came up with the idea of trash raccoons, a game about raccoons battling to be king of the trash heap, because let's be honest who doesn't love some cute trash panda's combined with some friendly competition.

So what is Trash raccoons all about?

Trash Racoons is a fast paced hectic player versus player party game in which raccoons sprint across the city to collect trash, bring it to their trash heap and maybe steal some from the other raccoons in the process, the raccoon with the most trash at the end of the day is proclaimed the king of the heap, at least until the next game begins.

We aim to make a fun enjoyable game that is easy to pick up for anyone and provides the competitive fun to keep playing in short matches of a couple of minutes as 1v1,2v2 or even free for all.

So how is the game coming along?

Currently, we are still in the pre-production phase as we still are figuring out what would bring the biggest fun factor to the game, how it should look, and of course how to make all the magic happen behind the screens.

so let's have a look at our progress from this week:

Game Design:

We had a meeting discussing some crucial questions we still had about how our game should work to put players in a close environment that promotes competitiveness while also giving them the freedom to roam, how to give the players visual clarity in a city environment, and how to keep it engaging and fun for all players.

At the end of our meeting, we concluded to build our prototype in an angled top perspective and divide our game into 2 different types of locations, narrow streets in which the player is bound to follow a garbage truck that leads to more open city spaces instead of putting all our fluffy friends on one big map, that way we can provide the players with a nice closed up view while they are in narrower streets that encourage the players to steal from each other while the bigger more open space provides the opportunity to roam and race all over the area all while avoiding player overlap with buildings by keeping the camera side clear.

we also discussed the ability for players to identify themselves through team colors and a  simple taunt effect to avoid confusion of who is who.

Art:

Our artists are currently making an art bible that sets the rules for a coherent and nice art style, we are aiming for a pleasing stylized game on the lower poly side of thing, currently, we are researching art styles that fit our vision of the game and fit the joyful feeling of the gameplay.
Two games that spoke to us the most when researching the style were "Donut County" by Ben Esposito and "AER: Memories of the Old" by Forgotten Key.
What both styles have in common is that they both use bright, vibrant, colorful environments and characters. Even though one style feels more 2D and the other feels more 3D.

“Donut County” lacks a clear light direction (or light in general) and shading. The only shading we see is a bit of contact shadow when a character/object touches the ground. The contact shadow is indicated by a faint shift in brightness to a darker value. 

The lack of lights means that everything is equally occluded and shadows aren’t present. Which results in a very 2D feeling of the game.

“AER: Memories of Old” uses a clear light (direction). This also means that we can see the shading on the ground and the assets themselves. Thanks to the light we have more info about the dimension and shape of the assets in-game, resulting in a more 3D look of the game.

To see what the difference would look like with our game we made a prototype inside of Unreal Engine 4.27.2.

In the following pictures, you can see a side by side of the same object/3D model, on one side lit by a directional light and viewed with the Lit view mode. While on the other side the model is being seen with the Unlit view mode.

Depending on the view mode we use, we get a different result, each fitting one of the styles from our inspiration. 

For now, we are aiming towards the look we get from the Unlit view mode in Unreal Engine. It has advantages such as quick results with easy color blockouts, but also disadvantages like having the difficulty of making sure the game environment is readable for the player to enjoy when everything is 2D and quite flat. To solve this problem we will look further into the art style of “Donut County” and see how they tackled it. 

Coding in unreal:

Because of no prior experience in Unreal Engine, making a basic prototype was difficult. First, we focussed on learning basic C++ Unreal integration. Quickly we learned that there were 2 fundamental differences with how Unreal and Unity operate:

• Unity is very “composition” based, as opposed to Unreal’s focus on inheritance.
• While Unity is freer in how you structure your program, Unreal has a specific structure it wants you to follow.

Because of this, we focussed our time more on getting to know the structure Unreal Engine expects you to use. While Unreal’s predetermined structure will slow down development at first, in the long run, it will speed up, because Unreal Engine has a lot of built-in stuff for you that you’d have to implement yourself in Unity.

That is all for this week,

 we hope to get some paws closer to a functional game by next week by having a fully defined artstyle and starting to prototype with our game ideas, we hope you  enjoyed our first devlog and that you stick around to see our progress over the following weeks.

Cya later fellow trash pandas.