Welcome back dear readers! This week we have changed quite a few aspects of our game, we have moved from the tropical islands to our home - Antarctica. And we move differently too, our balloons are holding us back, which makes for a greater challenge and a more entertaining mechanic.

Art

After some more in-depth research and thought, we settled on a cute and overall rounded artstyle, reminiscent of games such as “Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story” with its icy geometrical environments and feel and “Fall Guys” that inspired the blobby shapes of our main protagonists. In the art bible we have established the colors and shapes that will be present in our game, overall it's looking to be quite chilly, but don’t worry, the war paint of your regiment will shine through as each player has a designated primary color! 

The shapes are overall round, except for those pesky balloon popping birds! So watch out, or you will soon plummet to the ground.

For our main character, we decided to go with a rounded, cute penguin that would match the overall shape language of the balloons. He will also be wearing a military beret to show off the “warfare” aspect of the game, as well as some war paint in the player’s corresponding color. A little harness will act as the starting point for the balloons.

The HUD and UI should follow the overlapping “Antarctic” theme, so it will most likely be slabs of ice with snow on top. And once you finish the game, since this is a competition for graduation after all, you will be presented with your “Diploma”(Player leaderboard).

Shaders

As the game’s art style fits in the boundaries of low-poly cartoony style, a thorough research has been done on Toon Shaders, together with prototyping in Unreal Engine for both forward and deferred rendering as well as in Unity. The highest variety of support for this kind of shaders has been found for Unreal Engine with deferred rendering. During the whole process of creating the shaders (with the help of many tutorials) a total of 4 different master materials have been produced, 3 out of these are post-process. These kinds of materials are used in the Post-processing volume and they may be used for either the whole environment or specific areas or with a custom depth option, which is found by selecting desired object in the scene and searching in details for custom depth. 

Toon Shader #1

Toon Shader #2 - Cel Shader

Toon Shader #3 - Cel shader 2

The remaining 1 material is a shader used directly onto the meshes, however this one has been found to be pretty difficult to properly adjust compared to others.

As for forward rendering in the unreal engine only one shader has been made, which is much simpler both in terms of visuals and graph complexity. Moreover, it was very difficult to anything related to toon shader in forward rendering

For Unity engine, only 2 shaders have been made and they only work with Universal Render Pipeline. Moreover, it was difficult to find any helpful articles, tutorials or blogs that would help in creating a desired shader for the game. 

Coding

Preparation

A focus for this week is making sure the team is ready for development with the right information. The tech doc required some reason and thought on the matters that would affect development. The folder structure was changed and a focus was made on unreal engine and its systems. The focus on Unreal Engine came from built-in systems that exist and avoid needing to implement them ourselves. Several other things such as coding standard, target audience, etc. were discussed and noted.

Movement of the prior patch was simple and boring. After feedback on the movement, the balloon was put into question and why it is not used for the movement. Research was invested into a rather unique movement system where the balloon and the penguin depend on each other instead of being one entity. This led to new mechanics being added for example; a balloon being hit destroys the balloon, but a penguin being hit launches them and stuns them. Sadly this could not make it in this patch in a stable state and is expected for the next one. Lots of testing is being done to make it fun and intuitive.

Gameplay

Since one pick-up item definitely doesn’t cut it, a quick iteration is added. Crows are smarter than parrots, and target players more effectively. Item spawners will now randomly spawn parrots and crows throughout the gameplay, however weighted: parrots are twice as much more likely. There is some debate whether or not players that are low on health should get more chances of getting higher value birds.

The layout of the playfield got an upgrade. All spawners are located above a cloud, with the purpose of having a drop shadow underneath indicating the location of the pick-up. Clouds with spawners are scattered throughout the playfield, making loot easily accessible to every player. In the center of the playfield however, there is a bigger cloud where more loot will spawn, encouraging players to engage in combat.