Introduction

Hello! Welcome to our first devlog for our research and prototyping for our game project at  Howest DAE.

We are a team of 2 programmers: Fara and Mat, and 2 artists Aratt and Kaat.

Together we are working on a couch co-op game for the course game projects. 

Game Idea

Our game “OctoChef” is a first person couch co-op game where the goal is to cook together. The catch however is that you’re an octopus and every player controls one tentacle. For various cooking tasks you’ll have to work together while the orders keep coming in. We also want to add features where you can lose lives/arms by accidentally cutting your limbs off and annoy each other by stealing items from each other.

The actual cooking tasks, ingredients and dishes are still in its brainstorming phase. However, the game's core gameplay component will be the tentacle physics and the interaction with its environment. That's why this week is prototyping week!

Programming

Unreal Engine vs Unity

After research we found that Unity is the best game engine for our project.

Even though the artists have only worked with Unreal until this point, we as programmers strongly suggested using Unity. We think that a game needs to fundamentally be fun to play and the art is a nice plus. These are our reasonings for using Unity:

• Unity has existing FOSS scripts available that are crucial to our game (object slicing, required physics) 
• Unity has a more robust input system for multiple controllers, that is more fluid to work with (given team members’ experience) 
• Unity has an asset store with plenty of existing assets, also compatible with poly.pizza for prototyping 

Prototype

For now the octopus arm is modeled via a Bezier curve, with damped movement and some additional visual jiggling. This serves as a good test to show that a rigged octopus arm can work, and how it can be represented in the scripting side of things. Separately, we prototyped the feasibility of slicing an object in Unity. This is a feature that a multitude of game mechanics may rely upon, so it is important we verify it can work before designing them.

Art

The artstyle of the game will be heavily inspired by anime. The way they draw food makes your mouth water and we want the player to be able to make delicious looking food whenever you’re doing well in the game. (These example images are from Pinterest)

To achieve this result the artists first had to learn Unity since it is their first time working with the software. Then we prototyped a toon shader that gives a mesh with a single color multiple shades with different values. These values are split apart with a harsh line that gives them an animated look.

This shader also has a couple useful parameters that will give us a lot of customizability in the future! Then we prototyped a second material that gives our meshes a cartoonish outline. Again with parameters for flexibility. This effect was relatively easy to achieve on opaque objects but gave problems with transparent objects. The inverted faces of the outline were rendered behind the glass which wasn't the desired effect. This issue was later resolved using a fresnel effect with clamped values for the alpha channel. this made it so the faces that were facing you wouldn't render. These prototypes cover most of what the artists need to give an animated feel to the environment and its assets. 

The future

In the future we are gonna design a kitchen, food and the tentacles. We’ll also be further developing the tasks and various other gameplay mechanics. The game will be mostly built on whatever works best with our tentacle movement, to ensure the core gameplay is fun and engaging!

Thank you for reading!