DEVLOG #2

Hey again. Welcome to the second devlog of Moles in the Rough. We now have a name that might or might not change depending on if we come up with a better one.

This week continued with prototyping and researching. Read on to see how it went.

Art Research (Style and Concepts)

For this week, the goal for us artists was to establish an art bible for Moles in the Rough and fill it up with important information about our style – like the shape language, color palette, or lighting – so we could work clearly on whichever part of the game without any confusion on how to approach modeling, for example, props or environments.

We wanted to go for a style with simple but effective shapes and little detailing. Most of the texturing work we wanted to do in-engine with our material shaders. We took a lot of inspiration from games like the Last Campfire, Tunic, and Dragos Matkovski’s work, where things remain low in polycount and high in charm.  The textures were often simple flat colors or gradients, which also suited our direction well.

> Took steps to jot down information in the art bible - here are a few pages of what we have so far.

Right now, the art style relies a lot on style reference and written notes. During the coming week, we ought to create a mesh or two to "benchmark" ourselves on, with the idea that we have an easy model to take reference from that's a tangible thing, and not just an image from another game. We aren't looking to recreate The Last Campfire, after all.

> Level design was also explored, now that our idea of what type of art we were going for was more certain. Speaking as an artist, it’s always fun to go for whatever idea looks the coolest, but gameplay needs to unfortunately be taken into account as well. Things like where the interactable objects are placed, how should the pathways inside the drill be assembled… The level is taking shape but is still a work in progress.

> Enemy design was also explored, Moles and ants share the ground, So ants and bugs could be a possible enemy.

Art Research (Engine, Shaders, VFX)

Adding a gradient color control asked to rewrite some parts of the Shaders.

Every Multiplies between the different colors has been now replaced with lerps, which leads to a bit more sensitive adjustments with less easy good results, but now allows us to have more control about everything.

Blueprints comments and placements are cleaned up and now more easy to read.

Programming Research

This week, we started creating a working prototype that you can actually play with your friends. How exciting is that!  We created a stationary camera that allows both players to be visible on the screen while having a full overview of the inside of the drill. With the camera in place, we started to input the controls. It was very important that our moles could not walk off the edge and are locked in the x-axis of the game.  Otherwise, we could lose a mole or 2.

The drill has a lot of chambers that we need to access so we needed a system to get to the higher and lower levels. We created a ladder and an elevator to get across all the different levels of the drill. Only 1 player can climb on the ladder at a time and the moles cannot pass each other so you have to communicate with the other players to get to where you want to go. The elevator on the other hand is a bit more complicated than that, since the drill's system is already fairly old you can only use this elevator 3-5 times before it needs a reset by pressing 2 different buttons at the same time. This may not be required to complete the game but does open up more pathways!

As you may remember from our last devlog we needed to figure out a way to move our level! We ended up going for a moving background that is fairly modular, which allows our artists to focus on small detailed wall pieces rather than one big hole. When the top piece passes a certain point outside of the camera view it disappears and a new piece is added to the bottom!

VFX research

For this week, we further worked on the Fire Particles and looked how it would see in a furnace test mesh,  and we also worked on the mining phase particles how it would look like mining a gem.