Hi there!

It's us again, the Fare Exchange development team. 

This week we really focused on fleshing out our mechanics, prototyping as much as we could and really nailing down the basics of the game.

Sadly, we ended up doing a lot of administration work this week which took quite some time away from the fun exciting stuff. A lot of long calls full of discussions took place. Nevertheless, documenting our technical stuff and solidifying how exactly everything should work is very important for when we actually go into the production phase. Doing all that stuff now will make things go much more smoothly once we can actually step on the gas pedal.

Art

Sadly this week, we're missing on of our two artists. He had to undergo a surgery in the beginning of this week (don't worry it was pre-planned). Luckily everything went well and he says he's on track to be back with us somewhere in the course of next week. We all wish him a speedy recovery!

This left only one artist and due to time constraints we could only focus on a few art related things this week. So things like animation and characters went on the backburner a bit this week.

Firstly, our artist did some more experimentation with shaders. Last week , we made the Unreal prototypes and this week we slightly messed with them a bit to figure out how we could make the boat look like it was moving through the water without actually having to move the boat. We concluded that the boat should be static, since otherwise figuring out the navigation mesh for the AI for the enemies got pretty complicated pretty soon. So we're FAKING all the movement. Our river shader will try to do most of the heavy lifting. On top of that we'll sporadically spawn in some environment pieces and flavour sprites that move across the screen in the opposite direction to further give the illusion of sailing across the river. This was figured out together with our amazingly talented programmers.

On top of that, our artist took her first steps into creating art in Unity. Never having touched the program before made progress a bit slow, but we did end up creating a custom render pipeline (that's to control how the program actually renders out stuff, mostly materials), a test water shader and played around with settings and environment lighting. 

We did create a separate project for this so it wouldn't mess up any complicated code in our gameplay prototype on Unity. You never know with artists fiddling around with settings. 

A big chunk of time was also taken up by making a start on our art bible, which will be continued to work on once our second artist is back. Maybe this is a sneak peak into one of the topics of next weeks post, huh? ;)

Programming

A lot of really cool prototyping happened this week. We figured out a lot of specifics of our game mechanics.

We tried figuring out the navigation mesh and Ai for the enemies. A great start has been made and we can already attack and defeat our enemies.

We added a ranged attack so we could try to figure out if that would be an added element of fun for the players. A bit of playtesting was done amongst ourselves but we are hoping to have other people help our game so we can get added feedback that we might not think of.

The prototype/boat is now procedural/endless. We hoped to already be able to implement a full game loop but, at the moment, we are still figuring out how to "win"/"lose" the game.

In our Unity project, we added an engine mini game. We are hope to go for a lower maintenance task system. It acts as a sort of maintenance task. If you don't complete it when it pops up the boat will go slower and you'll inevitably have to deal with more enemies. Our previous idea was implementing a rowing task that would have to be done continuously for the boat to go faster. But after some testing we realised this might get tedious and frustrating for players. So now it will be a task that will always pop up but does not have to be done full time.

One of our programmers also started looking into the C++ aspect of UE5 (the coding language of the program) and seems to have a clear idea how we are going to be able to succeed.

We played with the camera shake and movement as we will be sailing this grand wild and mysterious river, so we tried that in order to enhance the feel of really being on top of the waves.

Lastly, we also tried to add a weapon for our boat, a very cool flamethrower that will help us clean the way.

Sound

We implemented and tested how collision areas will trigger our music and environmental soundscapes in Unity.

Regarding Unreal we now know exactly how we will dynamically mix down all elements. We will use Sound classes and Sound Mix Classes to control all levels of volume, and set gameplay events/states or use trigger boxes to push, pop, increase or decrease the mixing of the game's sound.

Animation notifications will also very useful to trigger certain sounds, like whooshes for example. Depending on the situation we can attach this spawn point of the sound to sockets and set a specific attenuation value to it.

In Unity as well, areas and box collision volumes can trigger different stems of music tracks or environmental soundscapes. We'll be able to layer sound effects one after the other.

What's next?

Exciting news, next week we'll try to finish our first actual demo prototype. It will be fully ready for playtesting right here, underneath our next Devlog! We'd really appreciate any and all feedback so we can make our game feel truly fun to play. We're also going to finish all of our documents we need to go into production. (And we'll make them a bit nice to look at so that we can maybe share some with you guys? If we're allowed that is.) And we're going to apply some task management and organisation tricks we came up with this week to hopefully make next week's work more efficient and smooth. 

That's all for today.

Until next week! 

The Fare Exchange Team