Introduction

Welcome to the first week of the Racc 'N Run game project, created for the Game Projects module at DAE Howest.

Our team is made up of three programmers and three artists, and together we will be making a fun and exciting multiplayer couch pvp game about raccoons committing a museum heist! Week by week, we will be working through designing the game, making prototypes to test out ideas and mechanics, going through production, polishing the project before the deadline - and we will be sharing every step of the process via weekly Devlogs. Each devlog will start with a short introduction to the progress achieved over the week, before delving into further details of the progress on the Art and the Programming of the game.

  The premise of the game is very straightfoward: all players control a racoon, and must run around a museum and grab as many shiny valuables as they possibly can before time runs out and the police arrive to capture the thieves making a ruckus.  The guards patrolling the halls will confiscate any stolen goods and boot the player outside if they catch them - and players are free to sabotage one another by throwing heavy objects at other players to knock them out long enough for the guards to find them. Of course, if they are daring enough, the players can also try to knock out the guards, or block doors and corridors with anything that isn't nailed down.

In this first phase of development, the artists have begun to construct the art bible and iron out the visual style of the game, while the programmers experiment with implementing the main mechanics to find out how to make them maximally fun and engaging, and figure out what will and will not be possible to get done in the dozen or so weeks we have to complete this project.

Art: Style,  Art Bible, and Testing Shaders

The team has agreed from the get-go that the game should have a heavily stylised, almost cartoony look- so our artists are already hard at work putting together the art bible to refine the exact art style we want for the game. With minimal texturing, most of the 3D models will probably have simple one-two color materials applied to them to achieve the desired look.  

Outlines for objects to give them more definition, as well as glowing outlines to make some of them stand out as particularly valuable, are being considered, and one of the artists has made a rough prototype of an outline shader in Unreal. While more research and work will be required to actually implement it in the game, this quick test was enough to see that it will certainly be possible to have a shader like this in the game if we decide we want to make this a part of the style, and if we decide to work specifically in Unreal . We may test making a shader in Unity as well, to keep our options open.  

Programming: Engine, AI, and Mechanics

Everyone in our team has experience working with both Unreal and Unity - so one of the first things we need to decide, is which engine is the best to use for our game. While the artists are working out what style we will have so that they can test how it would be to implement in the engines, the programmers are already experimenting with implementing the Guard AI and the grabbing/throwing+running around mechanics to see which engine lends itself better for the purpose, and in which it is easier to change, test, and refine the feel of the mechanics. We already have the answer to the question of whether Unreal is suited to working on these mechanics, thanks to the AI prototype and the grab/throw prototype (the latter of which is the very first build we have uploaded to itch.io) - now we are working on trying to replicate this in Unity. Over the next week we also plan to use both engines to prototype how the camera is going to work in the game, and whether to use split-screen view or zoom in-out to fit all the players on one screen.