Welcome and thanks for tuning in to the first devlog of our Game Projects game!

Our group consists out of two programmers, Rhidian and Arnaud, and three artists, Heidi, Ricca and Lion.
Our goal is to create a challenging, but fun co-operative party game in the coming weeks and we invite you to follow along to the progress we make every week!

The core gameplay the game is based around is a blind monster that can only see the players through the sound they make. Every time a player walks around, they make sound, alerting the monster of the player's location. The goal of the game is to work together with your friends to outsmart the Monster, collect various parts of a powerful weapon that are scattered throughout the environment and defeat the Monster once the weapon has been constructed!

In these developer logs, we'll talk about the things we've been working on and the problems we've faced and how we overcame them.

For this week's developer log, we'll talk about the art styles we're discussing, the possible settings, and what game engine we'll be using for the project.

Art

Setting

Since our game has horror elements, we've decided that the game will take place in an abandoned hospital. Our environment will exist out of long corridors, with blood splatters and forgotten materials lining the hallways.

Style

We're going for a stylized, cartoonish, low-poly 3D art style, in the vein of Sifu and For The King. We think this art style will fit our game amazingly, since it's attractive and simple, but visually pleasing.

The physical shape for the character models will be more cartoonish, with larger heads and relatively small bodies. This will be contrasted against props and environments which will for the most part have fairly realistic shapes and proportions relative to the characters. This is one of the ways we intend to add an uncanny feel to the game by having a contrast between the characters and their surroundings which makes the characters seem almost like toys in comparison to everything around them.

In terms of colors, we are likewise contrasting the characters against their environments. Given that the setting is a hospital, the majority of the environment will be using rather sterile colors; mostly whites and light colors, which will show in many places as shades of blue due to the low light setting. The characters will instead be using color palettes which contrast against this such as shades of red, yellow, etc. The colors of the characters will all have lower saturations to make them a bit more somber but to still let them stand out clearly from their surroundings so they will be easily identifiable by the players.

In terms of textures we intend to use textures with added grimy, dirty details both for the characters and the environments. Rust added to metal parts, stains added to walls and cloth and this applies to the characters as well. These details will hopefully serve the uneasy atmosphere we intend to create.

The end result of all of this will hopefully be an eerie setting where the players feel constantly on edge in the face of the threat they are facing, without making their characters feel too out of place; just out of place enough for them to get the distinct feeling they don't belong in their perilous situation.

Coding

AI

The past week, we've been researching the differences between creating an AI in Unity vs Unreal Engine 4. The biggest difference between the two is ease-of-setup vs. ease-of-making.

Setting up an AI framework in Unity is very easy and doesn't take much time, but making the AI itself will always consist out of writing scripts for the tiniest of tasks, and then combining all those scripts in a massive code-written behaviour tree. Setting up the framework in Unity is extremely easy, but it costs a lot more time in the long run, since we will have to write every piece of code ourselves, and define an entire AI's behaviour in code.

Setting up an AI framework in Unreal Engine 4 on the other hand is easy and requires a few clicks. This makes it sound like Unreal Engine 4 would be an obvious choice, but it isn't. Unreal Engine 4 has a lot of functionality already, such as a behaviour tree and a blackboard to centralize data, we wouldn't have to spend any time creating the framework itself. The problem lies in creating more complex behaviours in C++. The framework easily allows the programmer to create AI behaviours in a visual scripting language (known as Blueprinting), but sometimes we need the complex, but more powerful nature of C++ vs the easier, but weaker nature of Blueprinting.
This is where we run into issues, to get access to the C++ side of the framework, we need to write a lot of complicated code, but it might be worth it in the long run, since we will have access to both C++ and Blueprinting.

Even though Unreal Engine 4 brings its issues and challenges, we have decided to use it for this project, since the lighting capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 are quite more potent than the lighting that Unity offers.

We hope you keep following the weekly progress we make on our journey!