Dev log Week 01: Testing developing environments

Welcome to the first developer log of our project!

This week we mainly focused on choosing the developing platform and the general art style of our game.
We researched workflows in unreal and unity to see which engine would best suit our game, our skills and our time frame. We looked at both engines from the perspective of a programmer and the perspective of an artist/technical artist.

Technical art

On the side of the artists, we wanted to compare some workflows between unreal and unity, mainly the workflows of particle FX, post processing, shaders and materials.

Art

For the art style we decided to work separately in the first week of prototyping to create different ideas. Each of us artists made a mood board with different Ideas and concepts. Individually we chose one of our ideas / concepts which we then expanded on. We worked out some first drafts of one art bible per artist to show what kinds of moods, ideas, environments or player characters we would like to see with our current Game mechanics.

In the next meeting we will be able to decide on which theme will fit best for our game mechanics and target audience. Depending on the category we might also combine different ideas or apply concepts from one art bible to another.

We will need to still finish one fitting art bible document but by taking different art style paths, we created enough variety to be sure that we don’t get stuck with the first idea, but create something good. 

Programming

On the side of the programmers, we wanted to see which engine would fit the best for our game. Both of our programmers had experience with Unity, but neither of them had experience with Unreal Engine C++. One programmer focused on Unity, and the other one on Unreal Engine.

• Unreal Engine
  • Prototypes:
    • I created a prototype to test input & actor movement.
    • After the single player input prototype, I also created a prototype for multiple players
      • The most difficult part about this prototype was to find out how the how the physical controller reacted with the Unreal Engine Player Controller. At first I assumed that you could send input from 1 physical keyboard to 2 Player Controllers (by using the Player Controller ID as a unique identifier, so one Player Controller could use WASD and the other one the arrow keys), but this wasn't the case. Then I rewrote everything and tried it out with 2 physical controllers. I finally was able to move each player by moving the thumbstick on the corresponding physical controller.
    • Right now I'm working on expanding the previous (multiplayer) prototype so the camera adjusts the where all the players are in the world. I immediately ran into a problem (which isn't solved yet) that getting all the actors of a specific class in Unreal Engine C++ is more difficult than I thought. I found a simple function in the documentation which does this, but I haven't been able to figure out how to use is correctly. Right now when the function executes, it sometimes crashes.
  • Difficulties:
    • While working on the prototypes, the Unreal Engine forum and answer pages were offline. This made finding solutions to problems a lot more difficult. While writing this devlog I noticed that the pages are back online, so that'll make learning the Unreal Engine C++ a lot easier.