Introduction

Hello and welcome to our first devlog.

We are a small group of 5 students, studying at Digital Arts and Entertainment (DAE Howest). 
Together we are working on a couch co-op game for the course group projects. 

Our group consist out of 2 programmers: Arianna Lopreiato and Hanne Soubry, and 3 artists: Karolinka Fierloos, Albert Gimeno Limeres and Tom-Tom van der Heijden.  We are very excited to take you along our journey and give you weekly updates on the progress of our game.

The game we are making will be a fast-paced farming/gathering game where the goal is to grow plants and collect as many seedlings and plants as possible in a short amount of time. But you have to be careful. The plants can grow to be dangerous and hazardous to you, so it becomes harder to do your job as a plant gatherer! 

Art

What is our game going to look like?

Right now, we want to make sure that our game will have a coherent and nice looking art style. We should all be able to work on a style that both our artist and players enjoy.  We started on a rough version of our Art-bible and gathered some references we want to push our game towards.

We have been experimenting on some shaders, trying to see what could work and what would match with the art references we already gathered. The game will be seen from a top-down angle, like in the game "Overcooked". The players can run around freely, but the plants will be placed based on the grid. 

How are the plants going to work?

So far we've come up with 4 different plants. 

1. Ice: it will ice some of the tiles under its pot, the players can slip and drop what they have on their hands and the plants on the frozen ground will not be interactable.
2. Shooter: the plants will shoot “bullets” within a range that aim at the players, once hit, they are going to drop what they are holding, will be stunned and cannot move for some seconds
3. Fire plant: they will throw fireballs in the sky and the fire will rain on the map casually, if the fire hits a player it will be stunned again, but if they hit a plant they will be on fire and the player has a limited time to turn it off
4. Normal plants: they have no special effect and give you less fuel than the special ones

the plants will grow in 4 different stages

1.  Freshly potted: no sign of life yet 
2.  Starts sprouting: has no effects yet. 
3.  The full-grown plant: starts producing seeds
4.  Angry, full-grown plant: starts becoming hazardous.

Programming

Unreal Engine 5 vs Unity ?

Based on the research we did this past week, it seems that Unity is the most user-friendly, and gave us the least issues during researching. 
We've worked very little with Unreal C++ and with the new version of Unreal, also prototyping with blueprints resulted more confusing than it should have been. 

It's also true that Unreal it's great for physics, but the only big physic object we have in our game is the behavior for a water hose which we managed to pull off in Unity as well by using joints. 

Most of the desired mechanics were quite easy and quick for us to do in Unity while in Unreal took a long time or are still not working. We also didn't manage to test our mechanics in C++ and we would rather work in an engine which we can use in a safer way.
Given the fact that our game consists of small mechanics put together, if one were to not be finished in time, most of the fun would be missing, which means that we can't code in an engine we can't "trust". Unreal Engine seems to have a very steep learning curve, which we will lose a lot more time on it to learn the ins and outs. As a group, we prefer being able to use this time to play-test and focus on a fun user experience. 

How will we toggle placing the plants?

Since our game is all about planting plants, it would cause some issues being able to place them anywhere. If we confine the map into a grid, it would be a lot safer and will save us from some headaches in the long run.  Every time we start planting a plant, the placing will be snapped to a grid.  

The players will be able to run around freely anywhere, and other details will be loosely lying around the map. 

Of course, during prototyping, we will see if this way will actually work and if it's fun. Maybe the chaos of planting them anywhere will create its own type of charm.

Thank you for the read and see you next week ! :)