“Get off my lawn” (working title) 

Week 01 - Prototyping #1 

Concept

“Get off my lawn” is a four-player competitive game where the goal is to push the others off the playing field and be the last man standing. It is a fun, fast-paced game with a range of different levels, each with their own theme, special features and weapons.

Gameplay

The core mechanic for our first level, hitting each other with a pool noodle, felt a little bland in our prototype. We hope animations and making the mechanic more complex will fix this issue. Idea's like additive hit force and stunning could help. 

We still had to decide a level size, our artist made three basic level meshes, which seemed okay. The small level combined with the fast moving character and the pick ups gives the feel we were going for, perfect for a couch multiplayer game. Once the mechanics are finished we can rescale the character and the level to bring the gameplay to perfection.

We have a prototype with a static camera in normal perspective and one in orthographic view, we have also a working dynamic camera. At this point it's unclear which camera is the better one, although we will make it dynamic either way. Orthographic view seems to have the advantage that it has no scaling for objects running at the back of the level, which could lead to players losing sight of their character when a player in the foreground is jumping. We will probably wait to make a conclusion and see which camera view fits our art-style the best.

Art-wise we decided to keep it all playful with small characters with big heads and colorful props. The characters seen below are just meant for prototyping and the proportions will still be revised. We decided to go for a modular character with some customization such as the hair, beards and/or glasses. Depending on the levels, certain cosmetics will be added to the characters (for example: Pirate hat/Parrot in pirate level)

Troubles

We were eager to start working in Unreal Engine. School guideline needs us to write our code in c++ if we use Unreal. Although our team only had some blueprints experience in Unreal Engine,  our programmers are trained in writing c++ code, so c++ in Unreal seemed like a good idea. 

Quickly we noticed that the process with c++ code is way slower than blueprints. It's hard to find the right functions, and if you have a problem it's harder to find a solution on the internet than when you're searching for Unity problems. So after some struggling we decided to go for Unity. We are no C# experts, but we hope the big amount of resources (problem fora, tutorials, references, ...) shared by the Unity community will help us.

Unity seems also to have it's flaws, after building our first prototype we noticed that the collision was off while it worked perfectly fine in the editor. That is why, in the build you upload you can't interact with the collectables (shoes) and the throwables (crate), the push back when hitting another player with the noddle hasn't survived the build either. Other problems are the parenting of the crate to the player when the collect happens, the crates position isn't fixed to the position of the player.

Some of the placeholder meshes had already a hierarchy, and there was no uniform scale. The art team took this in consideration and agreed on a uniform scale.

Next week

Our main focus of next week will be to get 4 moving players, which can push each other of the level.
The interactable objects should also work in the build.
We fix holding objects and throwing them.
Try to improve the hitting mechanic already.

New idea's
- loot (balloons, crates, ... that drop collectables/throwables/...)
- turrets (fixed objects which you can controll, aim and shoot at other players