Week 02: Prototyping

Welcome back to the devlog! Let us tell you what happened this week. 

The Holy Artbible

The artists started really fleshing out the art bible with a lot of references and starting to build out the style. With attention to detail they went over important aspects that the style needs, like shapes, colors, shading and proportions. This is done for both the characters and the environment. 

We decided to go for a very round and cute style because who doesn’t like a cute underwater game. Nothing in this style is actually sharp, and even sharp-looking shapes or corners will have stump points. 

With the theme being under water, the colors are also important, considering blue is quite prominent. That is why the colors of the characters are more saturated than the environment to make sure that the game remains readable. 

The lighting has also been discussed, and the artists decided on a particle effect that creates god rays, along with the main directional light that creates soft gradients, to also keep readability and to convey the underwater light scattering feel. The water caustics decal is being projected on the surface, to mimic water waves. A post process volume shifts the hues to a faint blue, adding to the immersive underwater experience. All of the above has been thought to blend well with the previously developed toon shader,(it uses simple cell shading, reacting to the light direction, while highlighted by a rim light, fitting in the cartoon style of the game).

Choose your... Arena?

To keep true to the art bible the artists started to make more arena iterations. This is to see if it would be more fun to have different elevations or types of obstacles on the map which led them to the question if there was a need for a jump action. This idea was then discussed with the programmers. 

We created a drawover to visualize how everything would look mid-playthrough, with the previously discussed UI:

Creating A Punchline

The programmers have been further prototyping different mechanics. There’s a charge punch, for example. In Unity, different input actions and interactions have been tested and we ended up with a ‘Hold’ Input-Interaction. This charges up the power of the punch that will follow. When the trigger is released, a powerful punch gets delivered to your opponents. Show them a lesson! We tried to make sure the animations correspond to the right input. It is still quite a challenge for us to work with the animation system in Unity, since none of us had any experience with it, yikes. Though, one thing is certain: we will make it work eventually ;).

For the punching mechanic, separating the left and right punch (where the left trigger and right trigger controls their respective punch) was also prototyped. Adding this was pretty easy. It adds the feeling of having more control over your character. The punch collider was also changed to one collider on each fist, meaning you can miss your punches if you choose the wrong fist, which seemed like a fun mechanic.

Fast Chaos

We also added a Dash with the press of a button. When the button is pressed you get an impulse force into the direction you’re currently moving. This was pretty easy to implement, but it adds a lot to the feel of the game. Now you can zoom around the arena like a madman.

We already had a system that shoots pearls on the platform/arena. Now we can actually do stuff with them (awesome)! Using the left trigger, we can actually pick up the pearls. The chaos increases when you can throw these pearls at your opponents. Figuring out how to use a socket like system in Unity took some trying around, but we settled on a simple parenting approach to attach pearls to the player.

Finally we tested if using the right joystick to control looking and the left for movement was an improvement compared to controlling both with the left joystick. Further playtesting is needed to come to a conclusion. Testing this is fairly easy since we can have both in one project , so maybe allowing the user to choose at the start of the game would be a nice feature.

What’s Next?

The next step should be going into a fleshed out demo. Though without pretty textures and models (sad artist noises). We will also look into developing the design and have a more detailed idea of what the characters would look like. When we have this down we can also add more variation on animations and try out different things. The prototypes we developed this week will be polished and forged together with new ones that will be made next week into a fun playable demo.