Introduction

Hello there! We are the Fare Exchange development team and this is the first Devlog we're posting for our game project for the course Group Projects at DAE Howest: a chaotic co-op game where you fulfil the role as underworld ferrymen.

We wanted to share with you our process and update you on our progress by posting these little Devlogs which we will be updating on a weekly base. 

Our group exists out of two programmers, Brent and Sebastiaan; two artists Wout and Elle; and (lucky us) our sound designer Edwin.  We want to create a truly awesome vertical slice of the game we came up with.

The core idea of our game is this:

When someone dies and arrives in the Underworld, they must sail across the river Styx to reach the afterlife. Normally this is done by Charon, the Underworld's own godly ferryman. But Charon has been doing this job for thousands and thousands of years. And frankly, he needs a vacation. That is where you come in! Run your very own ferry in the Underworld with your friends and get paid by bringing people across the Styx. But make sure to keep your boat afloat! The Underworld and Styx are dangerous and filled with creatures that would love nothing more than see you fail. Repair the damage! Fight off pestering spirits! Keep moving forward! Get your passengers safely to the afterlife and you will be lavishly rewarded.

We hope you are as excited about this game concept as we are!

For our first Devlog, we will share with you what we did for the first week of our prototyping phase. Figuring out the big questions of what and how. We have a very limited development timeframe so questions of what is achievable in time are also very important. We considered a lot of research questions and wanted to share a few interesting ones with you all:

Design

Style

We didn't do a lot of designing yet this week as we first wanted to get references to the art style we wanted for our game. We gathered references of existing game that have a style or style elements that we really like. Let me explain them:

Death's Door and Tunic are two gorgeous games with a POV similar to what we want. They use beautiful shaders and lighting which create a good atmosphere and meshes that are all by all fairly simple. 

Overcooked has a similar chaotic type gameplay that we hope to achieve for our game so using these games as reference to keep our game readable seems useful.

Hades is a very cool game that is set in the same setting as our game will be, the Greek Underworld. We want to look at how this game uses Greek elements and architecture as well as colour pallets and mood. Not to mention it has great sound design.

One of our artist did already test out a few animations from Mixamo using a base mesh from the internet, which I will put here anyone that is interested: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/chibi-body-base-mesh-3281a1cffd804f1488b4ec0bbb6...

And here is a little preview:

Research into deferred vs forward rendering was also done. For now we settled on deferred rendering because it gives us more freedom and hopefully our visuals will not be too heavy. But more research and testing is required.

Unreal Engine 5 vs Unity?

This week we mostly focused on prototyping in Unreal. Our programmers had not yet worked in Unreal and were used to Unity, so this week we focused on getting them familiar with the program and testing out things. Meanwhile our artist did some lighting, shaders and animation prototypes in Unreal too. We made one prototype in Unity as well.

Next week we are going to continue doing research and prototyping in BOTH the engines so we can make an informed decision at the end of the week for what is best for our game.

There's a lot of things to consider when picking a game engine after all.

Shaders

One of those things to consider is how the lighting and shaders work in an engine.

For testing, we used a post-processing cell shader material from the Unreal Market Place to see if we actually like the cell shaded look.

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/ce2cda95e5f54180b2cf7df24...

We used a water shader from the internet for testing. Thank you Fabian Lopez Arosa for sharing this with everyone! https://carepasdesign.gumroad.com/l/jspog?layout=profile&recommended_by=library

Our technical artist also made a custom water shader.

The image below shows off our unreal prototype. It has a working boat and base combat controls. The water shader is a combination of the downloaded one and the custom one. 

Sound

Regarding audio, we did two main researches: 

 In Unreal, for spatialization we have different occlusion and attenuation settings, which gives us a lot of freedom in terms of immersiveness setting. Once our tasks and in-game character objects are defined, we will adjust it on the needs of the project, but our listener is definitely going to be placed on the spring arm of the camera, taking as reference the centre of the boat according to our research. 

 In UE5 as well, Metasounds is a procedural audio system similar to materials, that processes the audio mathematically from Input to Output, giving the possibility of separating the stereo signal and treating it differently for instance to the existing one, additionally it is capable of generating audio by itself, and make modifications to playable files, all in all, is definitely a more complex and useful tool than the existing sound cues. As a test, we created an procedural audio system of wind using a pink noise generator, that is modulated with a band filter, simulating the aggressiveness of it.

What is our main mechanic: tasks or combat?

One thing that is going to require more prototyping and definitely play testing is this: do we want to focus more on combat or on juggling tasks. We need to figure out what is more engaging and fun to play. What right combination of these gives us the fun and chaotic gameplay we're after? We have prototypes of the two systems separately now so next week we will start combining them in different amounts to see what is more fun. But also looking at what is doable in our limited time frame.

What's next?

There are still a lot of questions and research left, so we're going to continue to prototype. The artists are also going to make a start on designing and making an art bible to really solidify the style, so look forward to seeing things related to that! We're going to continue doing our best and we'll hope you'll keep up with us!

Until next week! 

The Fare Exchange Team