Welcome to the first ever devlog of Group 26 where we will discuss the progress on our project for the Game Projects course at DAE. In this week's devlog you will get introduced to the team, the game we are creating, the things we have done so far and what's up next.

The Team

We are a team of four students: there are two programmers, me (Lukas) and Michiel, and two artists, Inias and Kirill. In the weeks to come we will work together to deliver a fun vertical slice.

The Game

When night starts to fall and the humans plop themselves in front of the television for some well-deserved me-time, a secret society of birds gather. They come together from all over to do what they like best: bot fighting! The bots are made of twigs, bottle caps, leaves and other trash. And it's the task of one heroic bird to survive as long as possible against an onslaught of mechanical adversaries while the chickens, pigeons, seagulls, robins and other birds in the audience cheer him on.

So what have we done so far?

We brainstormed and we brainstormed a lot. Every team member came up with ideas, we discussed those ideas and further fleshed them out. We voted on ideas we liked, brainstormed on them some more and fleshed them out even further until we finally ended up with the idea above and a 40+ page Word document with random thoughts and ideas.

After settling on an idea we started to think about mechanics, what would work and what wouldn't. We tried some things out: both technical and art related things. We created prototypes, tried out mechanics, iterated on art styles and ideas and eventually came up with answers for some important questions.

• Which engine to use?

After some heavy discussions, doing research online and trying stuff our ourselves, we have decided to go for the Unity engine. Not because we feel that Unreal is any way subpar, but because the engine is more fitting for our project and group. 

For starters, it's quite a small project. While Unreal excels at big, large scale projects, Unity is more ideal for smaller games. 

Then there's the fact that Unreal is a workhorse, with raw power to be unleashed at any moment. Our game will feature mostly low poly art not in need of Unreal's power to deliver hyperrealistic graphics. 

And last but not least, our group has the most experience with Unity at this very moment. While we definitely wanted to learn how to work with Unreal C++ at some point, at this moment we want to use our time most efficiently and that would not be possible if we had to create a game at the same time of taming the beast that is Unreal C++.

• Which art style/setting to go for?

Much reference was gathered before settling on an art style and setting. We looked up pictures of birds, all kinds of arenas, games with styles we liked and games with atmospheres we thought fit well with our game. In the end we settled on the secret society of bird who gather at dusk to have bot fights. Even though the night is rapidly progressing, we still want to convey a warm and colourful atmosphere. The birds should be quite human-like while the bots are something entirely different: made from scraps and twigs and leaves.

• How to "balance" interactions with the gates?

When brainstorming about the mechanics, we came up with a few core ideas. One of them being a mechanic that spawns enemies from a number of gates in the are. We thought of giving the player full control over spawning by allowing them to close the gates to give the player control over te flow of the game. Two questions needed to be answered: is it fun to have this kind of control and how should we balance it so closing them is not death wish?

We tried out some different ways of interacting with the gates: having it close by the gate itself and making it an instant release button that drops the gate down. Another way was to have the gate controls further away from the gate and having the player interact with it for a longer time. After some tests it became pretty clear that gates closing instantly wouldn't be a lot of fun, so we went for option two where it takes some time to close the gate. And once a gate is closes, enemies still in the arena will be able to react to it in some way.

• How to scale difficulty with spawning rates and amounts?

Somewhat related to the previous question, it's important to make sure there is constant action and some type of end game. We don't want the player never closing the gates but we also don't want the player away from fights all the time. That's why we experimented with different spawn rates and amounts. Having a lot of enemies at the same time will certainly increase the speed of the game and will force the player to close the gates in a reasonable amount of time, otherwise he might get overrun with enemies. 

There is no real cap on how many enemies there can be, as that kind of defeats the purpose of having control of the gates, but it's still a thing we might need to add after further playtesting. Because we really want to avoid the following situation:

Other mechanics to improve the pace of the game are also in place. Like crowd approval, where the player will be punished for a defensive play style but rewarded for being very offensive.

The Build

The build attached to this devlog is a simple prototype of the core mechanics of the game. Fighting the enemies and closing the spawning elements to progress to the next wave. You can move around the level using WASD, when you are close to an enemy you can kill it by left clicking. Interacting with the gates (the spheres)  is done by pressing E for three seconds. And last but not least, the player can spawn a power up that kills up to five enemies in the vicinity of the player by pressing space. You can close the window with the ESC key. There are also some minor bugs, but this is a prototype after all.

What's next?

In the next week, the artists will further iterate on character models, enemies, UI and much more while the programmers will start to implement the core mechanics of the game.

See you next week!