Devlog 01 - Research

Hello world!
Welcome to our weekly devlogs on our game!

Introduction:

We are a group of 3 programmers: Bram, Elias and Mathies. We also have 3 Artists: Hanna, Flor and Stan.
We are trying to make a 2 player couch co-op game for the DAE course Game Projects.

Game Idea:
You play as Hansel and Gretel, they are enchanted together with a magic rope. Your goal is to find the witch and break the curse.
You will have to traverse a dangerous environment whilst using the rope to get through it.

Summary of this weeks progress:
The first couple of weeks we will be researching our key features that our game will have.
This week our artists are researching how to make our game look good in a coherent style. While the programmers are trying to figure out the rope physics needed for the players.

Art:

The artists mainly discussed what are going to be the main features that make our game look original and nice to look at.

We took inspiration from various games and even the old story book illustrations that feature fairy tales, to really capture the world that everyone remembers from Hanzel and Gretel.

How will we try to the accomplish the hand drawn look?

To give the game a storybook feel, we need to look at the key elements that those book illustrations have. We need to have an outline on our assets, and we would also implement a "hatching" effect in the shadows. Colour wise we know we want a hand painted effect. This would be accomplished by a noise on top of the base color.
As if a real person actually sketched the game with a black pen and colored it with a watercolor paint. The game itself will be 2.5D, the .5 means we will have 3D models but the camera only moves in 2 axis. We would create this using a custom shader, and to make the characters really pop we would handpaint those.

Another element is the color palette, when we look at prime examples of the book illustrations, its all mainly unsaturated, making it rather gloomy. We would make certain elements (interactive objects) and the characters really pop by having them more saturated.

Programmers:
The group started on prototyping the rope physics. We decided it be best that we split up and each try a different approach to handle the rope.

Bram chose to try the rope with a simulation of the rope separate from the physics. He did this by attaching a Distance Joint to the players and making it so they can get closer but not further than a set limit. He also made a Verlet simulation for the rope, then he rendered the rope with a Linerenderer. He concluded that the rope should not interact with the environment, since then the rope got in the way of the players.

Elias tried approaching it from a more physics based angle, where the rope pulls the players as well. The rope is made from linked rigid bodies.
He quickly concluded that he will also need a distance joint otherwise there was nothing stopping the players from stretching the rope thus ruining the mechanic. He used Brams movement script but changed it so it used forces and not setting the velocity.

Summary:

Upcoming week we will look into certain color palettes, making it rather gloomy or whimsical? We will also further develop the style and define more things regarding shape language, composition, etc

As for the programmers, we will to refine the rope and look into other mechanics that we will need for our game.

We hope to share more progress next week! Bye guys