Introduction:

Hi we are a team of five students working on a game for the course game projects at DAE Howest.

Our group exists of two students Game Graphics Production Nils and Mark. Two Programming students Theo and Tristan and a Sound Design student Liam. 

The main focus off our game is to knock players off the stage by throwing things at each other. If you knock a player off you get a point. When the time reaches zero the player with the most points wins.

Art:

The artstyle

We've chosen to keep our art style to low poly stylized with simple standard materials mainly focusing on individual colors and if needed a simple handpainted texture. We chose this because we like the casual look and feel and it  helps to showcase the game's goal of being simple fun.  We will of course look into combining it with a similar art styles and see what we like and how we can give our own unique twist on things. We'd also like to maybe look into giving the special throwables some more attention shader wise. This also highlights and keeps the focus on the gameplay which is for us our bread and butter.

style ref example:  Pummel party

The main issue with this artstyle is that the feel and actual style mainly comes from the lighting highlighting the form and hard edges of our models which need more complexity than boxes and other primitives can provide in fast testing right now, so next up is getting a decent block-out going to hopefully explore and experiment with the style more. 

Environment

We are playing around with a factory setting which would be made out of 3D models. The factory theme would come into play to produce the usable objects and influence the flow of the game.  As of now the environment would be made up out of the actual playable area and a surrounding part mainly for our theme but not interactable. Definitely will still need to flesh this out more once we have our gameplay locked in. 

Animation

Currently dependent on figuring out the ragdoll in it's entirety but if we need some simple animations this will be done by rigging the character and using keyframes in blender to animate.

Sound:

The main focus will be on the action sounds, as these are most important. The player needs to easily hear when they throw an object or when they catch it for example. To make it feel snappy, the bulk of sounds will be short. An exception might be the background ambience. To make the impacts feel heavy I will try to stay away from using low frequencies in the other sounds. All the other sounds will be more mid to high frequencies to stand out of the mid to low ambience.

Technical:

Engine Choice:

We chose Unity as our engine instead of unreal engine 5. There are multiple reasons for that: First of as we are not aiming for realistic artstyle unreal engine seemed like overkill for the scale of our project. Secondly the active ragdolls in unity seem to behave better, during the research we compared the way the ragdolls looked between unity and unreal. Unreals ragdolls do not do a very good job of staying in the upright position and "flop" around way more than what were aiming for. Not to forget that the implementation speed of unity is significantly faster than what we can achieve in unreal engine due to the scripting language being C# instead of C++. 

Rendering Pipeline:

For the rendering pipeline we chose unitys URP instead of the HDRP. While unitys HDRP looks better and has added functionality for volumetric effects, but the positives also bring disadvantages: HDRP needs significantly more Processing power and therefore isolates the game from lower powered systems like mobile devices. Furthermore URP is, according to our research, more customizable to get the look that we envision for the Project.

Coding and Research:

The main problem in our research was seeing if the active ragdolls would be feasible to implement. After playing around with unitys configurable joints we got to a point where we can safely say that it is possible even though we did not get it perfect just yet. This basic implementation works without a rig by just connecting rigidbodies that are affected by physics as if they were the body parts of the character. This way we do not have specific animations but rather just force applied to specific parts of the body with the direction that it needs to move to. While making this the main problem was getting the numbers correctly: "Is the character bouncy enough?", "Does the character get back up from the ground at a reasonable pace?" We are sure that this is not the final version but we can change the numbers at any point.

One of the main mechanics is the characters being able to be knocked back so we tested simple interactions between physics objects hitting the characters. This way a player gets hit by a throwable object it transfers part of its momentum onto the player character.

With this done the base steps for the project are laid out and ready to go into further prototyping.

But the most important question still is can you throw it back?