Introduction

Well hello there!
Welcome to our little game project that we are doing for the course Group Projects at DAE Howest!

We are a small group consisting of 2 programmers David and Joaquin, and four artists Lev, Ruben, Ebbo, and Sarah-Luna.  Our idea? A cozy, and slightly frustrating, co-op game to play with a dear friend where you will have to work together to reach your end goal. We will be dragging you along our developing process during the next couple of weeks. There will be weekly updates from now on that will show you a large part of our thinking and development process. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it as much as we do!

The game would follow a spy and hacker duo, with player A being the spy and player B is the hacker. The SPY would use a controller to walk around a level dodging cameras, lasers, and guards to eventually reach their end goal. The HACKER would follow along on the screen and aid the SPY with staying unseen. While walking around, the SPY can see IDs of enemies, cameras, lasers, and other items, that the HACKER can then use to execute a couple of commands such as opening/closing doors, turning on/off lights, distracting the robotic enemies, etc... The HACKER and SPY need to work together and communicate at every given moment to avoid getting spotted and to find a way to the end. And if they're not careful, well then they might end up in a pickle.

To start this project off, we will talk about some of the basics we've been looking at this week. 

Art

Last week we were still debating between 2 completely different art styles to go for. One was voxel art, or 3d pixel art, while the other was a style inspired by Death's Door. So instead of just picking one without a base on why we picked it, we decided to research both a bit first.

Voxel art

Although there a plenty of different programs and websites that cater to voxel art, some proved better than others. The style would've lent itself well to the '70s sci-fi setting we are aiming for as pixel art already comes with a major retro feel. It's colorful and expressive and although obtaining the rounder and oval shapes typical for the 70s might've been slightly more challenging, we were certain it would work. Also, we found that particles were not only fast to make but rather cheap too while looking great. 



However, we were quickly encountering some difficulties with the style. The first problem came in the form of scripts. Originally, the ideal situation was that we didn't need to hand-model all objects in the voxel style from scratch. We would've liked to use scripts or a converter. But that proved to quickly be less than ideal. Although they worked, there were a lot of cleanups to do and finicky tweaking of the parameters. And every time you tweaked the parameter it would have to rewrite again, which could take up to a hand full of minutes depending on the mesh. So purely time-wise it wasn't looking as appealing. 

The second problem was animation. Ideally, we want to use mixamo as none of us are animators. But the way mixamo skins the meshes, everything looked either warped or strange. So that meant we would need to animate by hand, which would take quite a bit of time.

Considering our limited knowledge and experience, and the limited amount of time we have to dwell on this, we decided against going for voxel art. So, that means we will use a style inspired by the likes of Death's Door.

Gameplay

For gameplay we started designing levels in 2D view and we also made a simple unreal file to test a very rudimentary version of some gameplay mechanics. With this unreal file we can build basic levels to quickly test the fun-factor of our game.

Gotta skitty, see you next week!