Week 03: The Ultimate Prototype

Damn, what a busy week. Let us show you.

You've got some style

Not a lot of development was made with the art side of things, considering we needed to focus more on the playable build and the implementation of the core mechanics. 

What we did do was the further development of the art bible and building out the style further. Instead of the more general pages we made last week we started specifying things more in detail. We applied that general knowledge we had to our game to get a clearer view of how it will need to look like. For example, instead of just a general picture of the particle, we worked out the exact process of how certain particle effects originate, grow and change.

Another example is the lighting and atmosphere, composition and UI pages where we made drawings that could actually be inserted into our game, making the art bible feel more specific, compared to how general it was last week. We found a cool asset pack that will help us convey the desired atmosphere: we will use the Customizable Sky Box asset by Key Mouse to create the stylized, underwater “sky box”.

We also worked together to finalize the Game Design Model, and while working on it we realized that we still had to agree and decide on different aspects. After the GDM was finally complete, we moved on to creating the specific tasks that will help us in the following weeks. Time for the production phase! 

A look in the mirror

So… Last week, the programmers got quite the reality check… Yeah…
We realised we were testing if certain things were technically possible, while we should’ve tested if those things were actually fun. Long story short… We had some catching up to do. We quickly wrote down what kind of different mechanics we could prototype to quickly test them. We also wrote down some more main mechanics we still needed to do. Once that was done, we divided the tasks across the programmers. Everyone knew what they needed to do, so we started working.

The structure of how we prototyped certain concepts needed some improvement because we implemented different mechanics in different projects, which made it really hard to test if certain mechanics were fun together. We decided to create one, main project where we create separate scripts for each mechanic. That way we can easily switch mechanics around.  

Pearl Mayhem:

One of the main mechanics of our game still needed some work: the pearls. First of all, we can’t have exploding pearls without some kind of explosion. So we made sure the players get visual feedback on the timer of the pearl by letting the pearls become gradually more red. Once the timer is over, they apply a knockback force to the players in range.

But you know what’s more fun than getting blown up? Blowing up someone else! So we ported the pick up and launch mechanic to this project and split up the behaviour across separate scripts. Then we made sure that when you shoot the pearl, it can explode on impact rather than the timer. Same goes for when it is shot out by the clam. Now you can throw exploding pearls at your buddies, you’re welcome. Make sure to throw it at their face.

We thought it would be fun to be able to counter the pearl when it comes flying at you. You would need to time your punch right to send the pearl back to where it came from. There was an issue where the pearl would be reflected immediately after a player throws it. So you basically blow yourself up. I guess that’s karma? We had to perform some tricks to make sure the states of the pearls work as intended. With this issue, we just made the player that throws the pearl protected for a second.

The clam is the guy that is supposed to be the shared threat for both players to ‘fight’, since it shoots out the pearls that will destroy the map. The players can fight against this by throwing the pearls at the clam. Right back at ya!

With every hit the clam takes, it will close a little bit more until it is fully closed. For this prototype we just represented it with the color of the clam. Red is active and dangerous, green is inactive. The clam will wake up again after some time and spread its mayhem again. The bastard… 

A real bastard it is, because we also implemented that when you get too close to the clam, it will launch the pearls right at you. You’ll get launched right out of there. We had some trouble with the collisions that would overlap and cause the pearl to not go into the correct state, but we managed. One issue was that when the pearl gets launched directly at the player it would register a hit with the arena first instead of the player. This caused the pearl to go into the timer state instead of the ‘explode-on-impact’ state. Pretty anticlimactic… Apparently the problem was that the target of the pearls was the feet of the player (insert facepalm). So all we had to do was increase the height of the target position.

Current(ly) the end

Our game needed a way to end, so we needed some kind of losing condition. The whole purpose of the game is to punch each other off of the arena, so we thought it would be cool if you fell up instead of down. There is a water current surrounding the arena that pushes you up into a killzone. This is really cool because it adds the fact you can still recover by moving towards the arena, unless you’ve got launched too far. We also added little water currents that follow a spline and that drags the players towards the edge of the arena. There are a few different spawn points where such currents can spawn. We came to the conclusion it would be better to have pre-defined currents and positions instead of calculating new ones at runtime.

Those currents have some particle effects to indicate what direction it pushes you too, but some issues popped up. If you increase the speed, the particles fly out of their course when the spline makes a turn. A quick fix was to add more points to the spline. Get caught in a current and we’ll salute you 🫡.

When the main current pushes you up, you’ll end up in the killzone. We quickly added a ‘lives’ system where you lose a life in the killzone. We also made sure the lives and the knockback multiplier are displayed on the screen. Now you can actually win against your buddies. Get shrimped kid! 

Ah yes, it’s all coming together

Finally, we had to make sure all the mechanics were available in one scene as the ultimate prototype. This took a little bit longer than expected… quite a lot longer. This was mainly because of some conflicts between certain scripts and some overlap in input. There were also some issues with the punching collisions. It would save the collided player, so even after the collision the players were still able to hit each other whenever the button was pressed. Yeah… that seems a bit unfair.

But hey, we managed to make it work in the end.

What’s to come?

Soon, we will get to hear whether we are allowed to start the production phase based on this ultimate prototype. Fingers crossed! If so, we will start from zero and start producing our beloved Shrimpact. If not, we will have to wait a bit longer, since we will need to continue prototyping to convince the Game Project Gods. 

The excitement to start on the actual game is extreme! Wish us luck!