Devlog 1: research

Introduction

Hello and welcome to our first blog post (hype). We are a team of 5 people studying at digital arts and entertainment. Our team is made out of three artists, one programmer and one sound designer. In the upcoming weeks we plan to create an amazing, thrilling racing game with babies. Be sure to keep on checking in on this post, cause there will be weekly updates. This way you will be here from the very beginning of our awesome game.

Since this is the first blog post we will provide you with a small description of our game idea. We are making a racing game where you start off as a baby inside of a see through hamster ball. the objective of the game is to be the first to make it to the finish, but beware cause this wont be as easy as it seams. Other Babies can crack your ball, this way you loose a lot of speed and you probably wont be be the first to finish. You can also be thrown of the racetrack, when this happens you are dead and you play as a 'shooter' around the racetrack. If u want another shot at winning the game, I would suggest shooting the other players of the race-track. When all players are 'dead', all of you respawn at start and you each get a another change at winning the race.

For this week we came up with several research questions for ourselves, so when we go into production we can estimate how long development will take and make sure  we wont be faced with impossible problems. To make it easier for you to understand we categorised them in 2 categories: coding and art.

Coding / proceduralism

Is our main mechanic fun?

At the beginning of last week we got green light  from the teachers to continue the idea of using a Torque mechanic as a main one. There was one major warning though,  Our main mechanic had to be fun and controlling. If the rolling of the ball isn’t fun the game wouldn’t be fun to play. Luckily for us the rolling mechanic turned out pretty good and we ourselves would love to play it. We started off with some issues with the ball not accelerating but that’s fixed. Even though we made the torque mechanic work, we realized some control was indeed missing. Because of this we chose to add a “sprint” and brakes.  Both of these make sure that the input of your torque has more impact. 

Rotating camera 

In most third person games you can look around a bit with your camera. So the movement forward has to be changed if you rotate the camera. The solution for it is really easy but it took us way too much time to figure it out. We're lucky we did this research now, cause otherwise we would stress too much in production.

How will the race track be made?

We had a few options for the racetrack. If we custom make the race track we cant really easily change it every game you play, so after a while it would be getting very boring to play the same track again and again.  Because of this we chose to build the race track procedurale. The track is gonna be made out of different assets that will be placed in a procedural way to make up the track. Kind of like lego blocks that will build up the track. The combination of assets and procedural tools will give the artists an excessive amount of options and customasation. This way, the environment can easily be tweaked mid-production if necessary and trying out new ideas can be done quickly. The shooter will be put in the middle of the race track, this way the track spirals around him and he has a clear view of where to shoot.

Art

Animation?

We first thought of using Mixamo to get simple animations in very little time, but unfortunately it does not fit with our game. Animations on Mixamo are very action-based and made for adult human models, this game has a cartoony/goofy style and the characters are small  babies.  On account of this way we came to the conclusion that the animations for our game will have to be custom made. This also means that the rigging for those small characters will have to be made by hand too. This allows for more customized and controlled animations later on.

Style?

Overall, we decided to go with a 3D stylized art style. close to the style of the games: "Fall guys" and "Racing balls".
In addition, characters are inspired by the "Boss baby" and the "Secret life of pets"

Next Week

This wraps it up for what we have done this week. For next week we are planning to implement and research the following:

• Clean (local) multiplayer handling
• Basic implementation of the player breaking his ball.
• Better rotation of the camera
• …