Introduction

Hello visitor and welcome to our game project for our course “Game Projects” at DAE Howest! Our team consists of two programmers; Bauwke & Khashayar, two artists; Louis & Aleksei, and one sound artist: Arthur. We hope to give you a thrill and a lot of joy with the game we will be creating and updating every week. You will be able to follow along our journey on these Devlogs. 

What are we making? Money! You are the proud owner of a money printing factory. However, there immediately seems to be competition in the money industry. Manage and evolve your growing factory while disrupting the competition’s growth by employing dirty sabotage techniques. A very fun co-op game to play against your friend.

At this stage, we’ve started prototyping and asking ourselves a lot of questions on where we would like to take our game and focus on. We’ve been able to answer a few of them, but more on those in the coming weeks. These were answered by making some prototypes in Unreal Engine, Unity, Maya etc. We will break these down in sections to make it more clear.

Code

Unreal engine or Unity? 

Each of our programmers started prototyping in a different engine. One in Unreal Engine and the other one in Unity. This was made so they can each talk about their experiences, pros and cons, and what would be better. These can also serve as a baseline to give to the other coder in the next week for prototyping and trying out more things.

UE:

Although you can start off with a template and it can feel like prototyping will go fast- implementing full features takes a lot of time. This made a lot of prototyping go very slow. The communication between UE and Perforce was also not completely flawless and took some time that could’ve been used elsewhere.

Unity : 

In Unity, we developed the initial prototype. It consists of a spawner that generates cubes and a conveyor belt that transports these cubes from point A to B. Once they reach point B, they are destroyed. Additionally, there's a machine in between that alters the material of the cubes to increase their value. However, we've encountered some differences in the physics system between the Windows build and the web build. I am actively working to find a solution to ensure consistency between the two platforms. Specifically, in the Windows build, certain UI elements, such as production rate and total object count, are not functioning in the web build. In version 0.1, there is currently only one factory. Players can pause and resume production by pressing the X key. We are committed to addressing these issues and improving the overall experience in future updates.

We will continue to test out both engines in the coming week with our main mechanics and make a decision to prototype in the chosen engine in the third week.

Art

An important part of a factory is its layout/structure, mostly regarding how the conveyor belts go through the factory. We designed an organized version where production lines are organized and a ‘chaotic’ version where the production lines are randomly placed across the factory.

It seemed better to have the chaotic layout to have the players search around to find what they need and it also results in a better looking factory. To make the layout more interesting/complex we also tried having the belts go over and under each other and having small bridges/catwalks going over the belts for the players to walk on and get from A to B more quickly.

Now -aside from the layout- the look of the individual machines is also an important aspect. 

Sound

Sonic mood board

Experimentation is the name of the game. While collecting ideas and references to other games and filling in the sound bible, I create various sound scapes and test SFX. This way we will find the correct audible mood and theme for the game. 

Integration

Due to the enormous complexity that is middleware integration into game engines and because we are simply not allowed to, middleware is out of the question. As the lead sound designer (and programmer) it is my job to look into the wonderful world of audio integration for game engines. In the following weeks I will look through different plugins and techniques that will result into a fast and quality-oriented workflow.

There are a plethora of ideas floating around for sound integration techniques that will have to be looked into. I'll go through each one and tick off the ones that are not a great idea for a project with a very tight time-frame.

What’s to come?

This was just the start! We will be prototyping more in the coming week with more structure and specific goals and questions to be answered. We’ve floated around this week in what we want to do and where to go and next week we will bring you more answers to questions and more concrete information about what you can expect in our game.

Until next week!