Devlog 03: Final Prototype!

Intro

Hya everyone! How has your week been? For us it has been pretty busy! Since this week was the last push towards a finished prototype we had a lot to do! But it's oh so fun to see everything come together!

We are all getting so excited about our game, so we hope you are getting excited too!

Comined Prototype

All our previous work was scattered throughout multiple projects. That made it easier for us to qucikly iterate seperatly and locally mess around without accidentally walking in each others way. But that way of working ends at a certain point. This week we had to prove to ourselves everything worked together! 

Level Design

For that we of course need a main level to work in! So that we made, a level!

Aside from the level design itself we also made a few rough assets and more narrowed down placeholder meshes

AI

Since Enemy AI / Enemy NPC's are a big part of our gameplay we made sure to put a lot of attention to this.

We made sure they can fully detect players through sight an sound, with different states to switch between depending on how suspicious they are AND they are able to follow a routine to do while unsuspicious (f.e. painting a wall -> get new paint -> take a rest -> paint again)

(the blue visual is a bit too small but the ENPC heard the player and thats why it turned around)

For this we also needed to have a working vision cone *again*... The first one was made in Unity, the second one was using a payed plug-in we weren't able to use in the end. So the third, and hopefully final one is a UE5 version of our Unity vision cone, remade through blueprints! 

Movement + Camera

Grabbing an object with 2 players at the same time, moving around and making sure the camera doesnt freak out when players move too far away from eachother was harder than we thought! But we got it figured out! :) 

All the rest

And for all the rest, I feel like you would just need to play the prototype yourself to get a feel for it!
Below you find the current control scheme of an xbox controller (more controls will be used in the final game), and for the rest.. good luck! :D

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Extra Documents

Except for the prototype we had tons of other work to do as well! Since working in a team means you have a lot of different minds and thoughts about everything, you won't always have the same idea about everything. To counter that we make a Tech Document, Art Bible *and* Game Design Document! They are all focussed on different things but want to achieve the same. 

Making sure everyone is on the same page and knows what to do.

We of course worked in this before already, you've seen some snippets of our Art Bible already. But now we finished up all 3 of them!

Art Bible

This is holy for us artists. In simple terms, if a new artists would join our group, and we ask them to create an asset, sprite or texture, they should know perfectly what we expect visually after reading through this, no further questions needed. We worked on it a lot last week already but we brought it home this week! We 

Tech Document

It's a misconception to think this is only for the programmers in the group! Altough it does say things about coding conventions and programming-specific things, the tech document basically describes all naming conventions, file management and.. well.. *technical* details.

Think:
-folder structures inside the game engine
-how we call certain files like f.e. material instances or rigged objects
-how we structure our code
-what engine, version, rendering method, other programs,.. we use

And so much more that more relates to the *pipeline* aspect of production instead of purely art or game design.

Game Design Document

We use HacknPlan for this. It's a nice website specifically made for our purpose (planning out the game making progress of a group)

In here we wrote out all our mechanics we would need for a final game, and divided these up in single tasks too! This means no one should ever be confused of what to do, do work that doesn't have to be doen or is done already

Outro

That was it from us this week! Apart from a 'have a nice week' we want to also ask our dear readers something.
What should the game be called? Right now the production title is "Vampire Heist" but we actually never put too much thought in it.

Should we keep the name? Do you have your own suggestion we could use? Let us know!

Bye! :) ~Bo, Mireau, Indy, Mia, Helga and Warre