Introduction

Welcome to our page Drunk Rush! We are creating this game as students from Howest DAE.

Our team consists of 2 skilled programmers ,Jolan and Maria . We have 2 talented artists , Daniils and Louis and we have one technical sound designer , Gilles. The game we are planning to make is made to become your next party game that you can't put down when getting together with friends. We will be bringing more information in these weekly devlogs, we hope you are about to be as excited as we are about this project!

The core design of the game is set in a Midsommer feast in an old Viking village where your vikings are enjoying their time but there is only one piece of meat left. There can be only one solution to resolve this conflict... . They must run the course and see which viking is most worthy of that last piece! Of course at a feast , the vikings are drunk so the running of that course will not be that straightforward.

The game mechanics design is a local PvP game where up to 4 players have to run an obstacle course against each other, first one to the finish line wins! The parcour won't be that easy on the players there will be many obstacles coming their way that they have to parcour around. Remember the game is a PvP experience so there will be ways of obstructing your opponent. The vikings will be able to pick up a trusty axe to throw at the others in order to get ahead.

In this first week we will be talking about the first questions we answered about our project , still figuring out the specifics of the mechanics and of course also important all the technical details on how we will breath life into our design.
There are 3 sections to this : Art , Coding and Sound

Art

The artstyle our artists are aiming for is a stylized low poly models inspired by games like mario 64. The design will be inspired by the narrative of midsommer.

Lighting stylised but realistic lighting, simple shapes, (maybe) low poly, gloomy, friendly. (Something like a more realistic minecraft), fuzzy grass, layered dirt (mario-ish), playfull style, chunks landmass. Summer setting, nice weater, blue sky, happy. the birds and the bees type stuff.

One technical test we wanted to get out of the way since we use water in the game was the shader for this. Unreal gives us more control over the shader and waves settings of the water , in Unity it's rather basic.

we will be using Blender-For modeling props and environment. We use blender for prop and environment elements,level art making pipeline,since Blender is more convenient for making game ready assets the software has may useful addons that provide you with quick and efficient workflow. And we use Maya- for rigging,animating, making characters. We use Maya for making,rigging and animating all in-game characters.Because Maya has better rigging tools that provides efficent rigged and animated game-ready characters workflow.

Coding

The engine we are leaning towards is Unreal engine 5. While most mechanics we tested are doable in both engines (Unreal Engine/Unity), Unreal provides a significant advantage for our project because of it's built in character system. This allows us to take full advantage of
the physics system, which allows us to handle movement speed, jumping and bounce more easily.

This week we tested most things in seperate, quick and sloppy projects to test as many mechanics as possible. Now that we've chosen an engine, the coming week we'll focus on putting all of our mechanics into 1 combined project where we'll also experiment using Unreal C++. Depending on how this goes we might still change our chosen engine to Unity, but for now our mind is leaning towards Unreal Engine.

Something we put a lot of focus on this week was the movement of the character and the camera functionality. In Unreal engine the springarm functionality gives us a lot of simple control over the camera. The camera will work so that it keeps all players on screen but gives a bit of space for the player in front so they can still see what's coming.

the movement of the character is doable in both engines but as mentioned before the character class within Unreal Engine gives us a lot of tools to start working with.

Sound

Our sound designer has this week been busy working out the sound bible and the general mood the project will convey. Sound is often seen at the end of the pipeline but even during these budding stages of the project it is important to think about . The sound also influences technical aspects of the project like engine choice.

The choice we are heading towards is Unreal Engine 5 which gives us access to the meta sound system and this is interesting because now the code can have easy influence on what happens with the sound.  Implementation like this can also be done in unity but it will take extra time to script these interactions ourselves.

Our general style is Midsommer and the sound design will reflect that , the goal is to immerse the player and really feel like they are playing a game at an old viking feast gunning for that precious last piece of meat.

Moving forward

In the next week we are going to work on a coherent prototype that combines our mechanics so stay tuned for that!