This week we started working on our artbible, design module and more prototyping!

Art

For the art, we worked on the Art Bible and decided on the art style, which will be the 3D low-poly style! We defined propotions, color palette and main obstacles in our level. We had a discussion about which art style should we pick for our game- Low Poly or Retro style. So our artists made a reasearch, and tested how both artstyles work in the engine. After testing and asking an opinion of the rest of the team. We decided to choose the low-poly style, because it better fits with the concept of our game.

One of our artists explored the idea of the retro style and the conclusion was that it is a valid road to go with the game but considering our limited time budget and difficulty of the style to really make it work we decided to stick to 3D low poly.

After finishing the Art BIble. We added a 3d blockout of our level, to have an idea how our game will actually look like in the engine. We made different versions of obstacle track to see how it works with 2,3 and even 4 players! Also we tested how to make our level more competitive and give more space for PvP mechanics in our gameplay. We also tested the idea of checkpoints mechanic in our level. After this our initial base for the game level was finished. After testing everything in a 3d software, we imported everything in Unreal Engine. Made proper collisions and light in the level. We made a full walkable 3rd person view level based on which we can continue work on our project.

Programming

As mentioned in last week's devlog, this week we started with experimenting in Unreal C++. It took quite some time to set the project up and we ran into some issues getting it to work in combination with Perforce, but we managed in the end. Although it took way longer than expected we have decided to stick with Unreal and it's our final choice of game engine. It will be a great challenge to finish everything in time while also learning to use this new "programming language", but by dividing our work efficiently and having our artists handle things like UI and Animations, we think it will be managable as the programmers will only have to deal with the main gameplay and mechanic implementation.

Some of the prototyping we did this week was on specific mechanics , some examples:
-Axe throwing mechanic : the conclusion on this was that it is an essential mechanic that makes the game fun and it stays feasable with the parcour
-Beer pickups : this activates our drunk effect and it will essentially make the player faster but also harder to control because of it so failure of parcour becomes a bigger issue , its a promising mechanic
-Double jump : if the level design is catered to it then it can work , it can add depth to the gameplay and increase difficulty in the level design which can be interesting.

Sound

Since we were looking into a more retro style vs low poly art style. We looked into how sound would have to be done using 16-bit. That would have proven very time consuming considering if done correctly it would work with synthesizers and that is outside of our time budget. Bitcrushing and compressing the sound was the cheap alternative but that doesn't do the game justice.

Based off of this and other factors we decided to stick to 3D low poly art style so in this manner the current research that has been done on sound still stands.

We also more closely researched the options of interactive music , basically having the gameplay influence the stems that are playing within the music. Close to the end of the race there will be control of extra stems being injected into the music loop increasing the intensity.