Devlog #02 : Prototyping & Engine switch

Welcome to week 2 of our devlog for SKalley!

We have made quite some progress and a major change since our last devlog and we would like to share some of it with you.

Art

Our artists have started working on the Art bible. This will steer our art style in the right direction, but it also serves as an emergency buoy for whenever they need to get re-inspired or get lost in the artistic world. We will be using this bible throughout the rest of our project, so this is a very important document to have properly finished at this stage of the project development. As a sneak peek, here are some of our current design choices.

Moodboard

Colour

Character proportion

The proportion of the character will be cartoony and stylized, inspired by Gang Beasts and Legend of Zelda series. The character will be on the shorter side, compared to the environment and assets. The size of the character's head will be quite large in comparison with the rest of the body.

Camera positioning

We thoroughly iterated through various camera iterations to test how our game would play the best with as we won't go for a split-screen approach. Another thing to take into consideration was how the camera angle will affect the controls, as seen in No.6 where the camera is placed sideways, but that means moving upwards will feel awkward at this angle, unless we change inputs
After many tests, we have possibly found a suitable camera angle, no.2 & 3 are currently favourites within our team.

Level design

What's next?

• Finishing the Art bible
• FX Design choices
• Explore the texture pipeline

Technical

Game Engine switch:
We first want to discuss the elephant in the room. We are switching from Unreal to Unity for our game engine.
There are several key factors as to why we decided to do this switch.
First, we are not aiming for a realistic art style unreal engine seemed like overkill for the scale of our project.
Secondly, everyone has been having very annoying issues trying to delete & rename files in Unreal which led to cluttering of the project if we didn't clean them up.
Thirdly, we had some serious delays just trying to fix connections between c++ classes and its blueprints, losing this much time is trivial if we want to make a successful game, Unity is in general a lot more easier to tame with Perforce.
Lastly, writing C# is generally easier then C++ code.

Programming

Mechanics

What's next?

• Switch over to Unity and learn the workflow over
• Add a Pickupsystem
• Game Design Document
• Audio integration tests
• 4 player gameplay

And with that, we finished the 2nd devlog! Thank you for reading this!
Until the next devlog!