Introduction

Hey there, and welcome to the development journey of our game for the Game Projects course at DAE Howest!

We have 6 people on our team. Indy, Bo and Mireau will handle all the programming. Mia, Helga and Warre will do the visuals! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a co-op stealth game where players take on the role of vampires who need to leave their mansion, taking all their belongings with them. New people moved in and the World Monster Association demanded them to get out, without being seen by the humans of course! No one can know vampires really exist after all..

Now what have we done already?

Brainstorm

Game Ideas

In the very beginning we needed to get a base idea to work with. All we knew was that we had to make a couch co-op game, made to be played with controllers. that's all!

So long story short, after a few meetings and a lot of sketches we whittled down all our ideas into one. "Vampire Heist"!

This took us a long time talking, thinking about ideas and 'playing' the game in our heads. We can't show many interesting things about that stage but here is a small sketch we made that helped clear up the game a little bit.

Art

Visuals

We don't want to choose an artstyle just because it lies in our comfort zone or because we saw one reference picture that we liked. We want to see what fits the game itself the best! Our first step was deciding a camera view. We tested a lot, fully top down, more sideways, zoomed out, zomed in,... But in the end we landed on this: Altough it can still change a little bit of course, we know have a uniform camera which we can use. For this we quickly threw together assets from different asset packs. None of these assets are final but it helped us to get an idea of where we should take things visually.

We have decided we are going for something stylized and chunky. How this will look specifically will be for next week! Why?
We are also going to prepare an art asset pipeline from the start, and this process will go hand in hand with the art style itself. So we waited a little bit so we can do this simultaniously.

Sound Detection

Playable Prototype

For our game we want to make sound an integral part of it. Players should have to sneak past without bumping into anything or breaking any vases. For this we need an advanced sound detection system that is able to handle complex levels with walls all around. Because of that, this is one of the first prototypes we focussed on!

Vision Cones

UE5 or Unity?

Apart from sound, vision cones are another thing that area must have in stealth games (or at least ours). Since we still have both Unity 6 and Unreal Engine 5.5 as options we tried out both software, to see how these would work!

What's next?

More prototypes?

We have figured out a lot this week already, how the gameplay will look, how the controllers will work, what the main gameplay loop will be! But there is some more to test out. How to carry something with 2 players at once for example.. The prototype for that is in the works, but it isnt finished yet. So look forward to that!

Art Pipeline

If we want to make a big mansion, and not have it all look super similar, we will need a lot of assets! For that we're going to design a super efficient pipeline to get the best possible visual results as fast as possible! Stay tuned!

Let's hear from you!

Have you found us already? Do say h in the commentsi! It will greatly motivate us to keep working dilligently on the game!
And who knows, if you