DEVLOG #1

Introduction

Hello to all readers! Welcome to the first development log of Core Crusaders. Or Tunnel Titans. Or Shaft Shifters. (The name’s still being workshopped.)

We’re a group of 5 students currently studying at Howest Digital Arts and Entertainment (DAE) and we’ve been tasked to make a couch co-op game together. Amber Pérard and Sam Corluy are our Game Development students taking care of programming and making sure this game runs, and Duhan Bas, Lucas Raynaud, and Tuomas Paul are our artists, focusing on all things related to the visuals.

In our game you’ll be a part of a group operating a mining drill in search of rare and valuable gems, where the goal is to reach the bottom of the planet’s core and get as many as gems while at it. But there’s a few problems – the drill needs gems to keep operating, and you’ll need to give up some of your precious minerals to make sure it keeps going and gets upgraded. You’ll need to complete tasks together, make quick choices in a small space and manage resources carefully, a to make sure you get down safe and alive.

Be wary, though -  the word is that the boss is looking to fire the miners who have the least number of gems at the end. Budget cuts, he says. So be careful not to spend all your gems uprading the drill - you might save your life, but not your job!

Art Research (Style and Concepts)

The priority was to collect and establish a mood board and a general sense of what style and aesthetic we’re going for, so we can start prototyping material shaders fitting the chosen aesthetic.

-> A mood board was established with stylistic references and breakdowns of said references.

-> Character design was explored, mainly to see what kind of body shapes we would end up with, as that would affect our animation pipeline. As our group has no dedicated animators, Mixamo is a strong consideration for rigging and animating, and that has its own limitations on what kind of characters we could use (They must be mostly humanoid, in that case.)

-> Tested out if Mixamo could work with these short-legged, stylized models.

Looking good! 

Further goals:

-> Establishing a more solid foundation for the Art Bible based on the stylistic references we chose (Shape Design, Color Palette, etc.)

-> Fleshing out the level and drill design - what will the background look like, what about the drill, etc.

->Creating assets based on results of previous goals and seeing how they work with our prototyped material shaders

Art Research (Engine, Shaders, VFX)

The goals for this week were to experiment creating material shaders based on our chosen style direction, figuring out engine differences in material shading, figuring out differences between forward and deferred rendering, and based on gathered information making the choice of engine between Unreal Engine and Unity (with perspective from both the artists and the programmers). Ease of use and time-usage were also considered regarding the choice of engine.

We also wanted to look into VFX and experiment with them - was it possible to have effects that fit with the general style we were going for?

-> An Unreal Material Shader has been created to help the texture work.
This material aims to recreate handpainted texture style without any real texture painting. This works with Noise, Object Space Gradient, and some math adjustmens to make the shader look as we want it to look. Instances have capped tweakable parameters to make it easier to create something quickly.

After lots of tries of having Edge Color Control with different ways (outline shader, Pixel Depth Shader, Curvature Shader found online...) the idea was given up to create this simpler material.

->We also asked ourselves if we could we use normal decals to enhance the results.

->Forward and deferred rendering was compared with an engine prototype and a test scene. As our game would most likely have multiple real-time lights interacting with each other - lights surrounding players when mining gems, for example - deferred rendering seems like the likely choice due to its friendliness towards lights and shadows.

->VFX was created in UE5 with the intention of making it with look like chosen style direction, to not only set a benchmark for future vfx but to test out if we could even do it. It's render path was deferred.

Programming Research(Split-screen/multiple game-pads)

Considering the goal is to make a couch coop game we had to make sure that both engines could support multiple game-pads. Upon doing some research we came across an issue with ue5.1 that allowed only one game-pad to be properly assigned. So we went ahead and tested this and there indeed seems to be a problem, that's not good for a coop game is it? Not to worry, we quickly came to the conclusion that the cause was a delayed variable initialization, which allowed us to find a solution and get it to work without a problem. Now onto unity, which thankfully didn't cause as much of a headache and we got it working fairly quickly.

Now we have that out of the way it is time to look into split-screen. Unlike with the game-pads unreal engine made our life fairly easy and took care of almost everything! Which brings us to unity, and oh boy... Because of the Cinemachine camera's this took quite some time to get right, but after some headaches we got it working there as well!

Whats next?

--> Figure out how to make splitscreen level specific. we don't want splitscreen in the drill stage!

Programming Research(Drill movement)

Since our game takes place on a drill that is going deeper into the earth it is a good idea to figure out what we are going to move exactly. What do we mean by that? We can either move the drill lower into the level or we can move the level up making it appear that the drill is going down. While it may seem logical to move the drill downwards this does come with its fair share of problems!

• The player would need to move in the local space of the drill and this is not so easy to accomplish.
• This approach could also cause issues with gravity on loose objects.

Taking this into consideration it might be easier to just move the level upwards, making it seem like the drill is going down.

Closing words

There's a lot to think about when moving forwards, both art and gameplay-wise. Things will no doubt be in flux and change quite a bit. We'll work hard to make a good game - and we'll hope you'll be with us along the way!