Introduction

Welcome, dear reader!

Welcome to our very first devlog with many more to come where we take you on the path of creating our game project. Our team currently consists of 2 game developers, Chai Leng and Rik and 2 artists Bisong and Tibo. The 4 of us are about to embark on creating a game filled with passion, chaos and fun.

Let me introduce you to our game, Restoration Rally. A 2-4 player couch co-op game where you have to make sure that your car doesn’t fully break down and explode (The car doesn’t have insurance…). You have protect and repair the car by managing the fires that occur inside and repairing as much as you possibly can, from gun jams to engine failure. Oh, and for our trigger-happy readers, yes, there are turrets to send oncoming enemies to the grave. You better kill them fast or the car will get damaged a lot and you won’t survive for long.

First prototyping week

As we just finished the first week of prototyping, we tried answering some of our research questions that occurred during brainstorming phase. Most have an answer but not all have a solution yet, but we will keep you all updated on the progress.

Artstyle reference

We are focussing on a more stylized and fun art style. We want to have a game with a fun and nice look to balance out the chaos among you and your friends while playing. Some great examples that we are looking at are “Overcooked” and “Pummel Party”.

Here you can see a quick preview of our current baseline shader. The shader currently has options for saturation & contrast, an overlay tint to the color and a gradient that can change directions and has some control parameters.

Research

Unreal Engine vs Unity

For our first week the artists mainly prototyped inside Unreal Engine since the blueprints and base templates make it easy to quickly test something out. The programmers have done research in both Unity and Unreal Engine in which they've explored approaches for implementing mechanics in our game.

We are leaning towards Unreal Engine for our game engine but that doesn’t mean we have ruled out Unity already. Now that we prototyped some stuff in Unreal, we will prototype them in Unity as well as this will provide us with valid info to help with our definitive decision.

Render pipeline in the engine

There are 2 main rendering pipelines in both Unreal and Unity, Forward Rendering and Deferred Rendering. This is also an important decision of course, Tibo, 1 of our artists, has been doing his homework on both of them trying to find all the pros and cons of both. Currently, we have a decision but the decision isn’t 100% yet, more like 75%. You see, the prototypes were done in Unreal and next week we plan on quickly doing it in Unity as well.

There might be a difference that could be beneficial in the final decision. Deferred is currently our decision because it has more settings for the overall visuals of the game, useful settings that could push our game to have better looks in the end.

An optimized and endless road system

Since you are in a moving car, having a well-planned implementation of an endless road is important. Since it is endless, it should be optimized and not cause issues with the game. Chai Leng, one of our coders, has been looking into this and made a prototype that is able to spawn segments of the road that are recycled as they move away behind the camera.

This prototype build is also downloadable. The player can steer the vehicle by approaching the blue cubes at the front of the vehicle and pressing the ‘E’ key.

The camera angle

The camera angle seemed to be a trickier question to answer than we thought at first. A lot happens inside the car, so the car needs enough space on the screen to make it all work. We need to have enough space to actually spawn fires and fit a max of 4 players, but, on the roads, obstacles will spawn so you have to move the car from lane to lane to avoid them.

This means we need to figure out a way to show the player an obstacle is coming. Zooming the camera in to make the car bigger means less space for the road. Zooming out to give the road more space and seeing the obstacles coming makes the car too small for the players to play in it. Besides that, we are also looking into having the car going upwards on the screen or having it go left to right since this has a large effect on the spacing as well.

So we have answers but also more questions, this is definitely something we will prototype further next week.

Is shooting a turret fun?

Yes, shooting a turret is indeed a fun mechanic and also an important one.

Tied with the camera angle, 4 turrets can quickly fill up the screen. Further testing of the ideal size of the turrets compared to the vehicle will be necessary to make it all work out.

The spawn rate of the enemies will have to be tweaked as well in comparison to the number of turrets and players. Our enemies, which will be drones in our game, will have to be prototyped as well. The movement is important and will have to work together with all the rest as this also has an impact on the aiming, fire rate, and difficulty scaling.

This will require more in depth prototyping next week in combination with the camera angle.

The End

This will be all for this week's devlog. If you read it all the way from top to bottom, that means my way of words and our game idea is interesting enough to keep you reading. I hope I can keep that interest going and see you all next week with more news!