Introduction

Hi! We're a group of 4 students at DAE Howest that have the opportunity to make an awesome game for the course Game Projects!

Our group consists of two programmers, Seppe and Nigel, and 2 artists, Alicja (Tech-artist) and Remi.
After our brainstorm sessions we've decided to make... a soccer game?!
None of us really play soccer games but thinking up of ideas on how to make a unique and fun version of soccer got us excited and ideas just kept piling up!

The game will be about aliens trying to take over planet earth by the oldest known method of inter-species invasion and extraterrestrial entertainment... Soccer! Or as they would call it: Footie-Frenzy.
Only earths most mighty heroes could stop them as only the most heroic of penguins will be able to protect our planet!
Soccer your way across the field using your own species' special ability, kicking the ball in all kinds of creative angles and outplay the other species to conquer the stadium.
Each goal will expand your half, indicating another step to total domination!

The first devlog

In this first devlog we will explore questions asked throughout our brainstorming and prototyping, the thoughts/discoveries of both artists and programmers and share insights on what we worked on.
This blogpost will be split up with a coding and an art section!

Programming:

Unity vs Unreal Engine:

Choosing an engine was one of the key questions we had to ask ourselves while prototyping. Both have big advantages, different for artists and programmers.

Our main choice went to Unreal Engine 5.3.
This because of our personal experiences and the benefits of the following aspects of unreal:

• Built in character/pawn movement components, that provide full control over the built in physics system and interacts extremely well with the engine as a whole
• Built in 3D animation system, providing an intuitive way to control what movements are active and how to blend them.
• Ease of use in lighting and material system, which despite its ease of use can still go very in-depth and stay customisable to a very high 

The main difficulty that could come up when working with UE is that we've never worked with Unreal C++.
Unity does provide us with more comfort and we do have a deeper understanding of the use of programming in it, aswell as how to communicate between parts of unity (eg. class to class).
Yet the benefits of UE outweigh the experience we have with Unity, and it being new brings up excitement and curiosity

Questions we asked or came across

how to kick the ball?

The most important thing in our soccer game is of course kicking the ball.
There are many ways to implement a custom physics system, as well as use the built in unreal system.

The main things we tried are using custom gravity and angle calculation, using a character component, and using a pawn component (with movement).

The most intuitive and customizable option by far was using the default UE physics on a static mesh of the ball, and using a character move component for the player.
While this is a very customizable method for both sides, it does however require quite a bit of tweaking with numbers, and calculating manually at what angle the ball is kicked

This was a perfect opportunity to dive into the first cpp based files to make a cpp-based class, that can also use blueprinting.

Is the gameplay loop fun?

After implementing a kick system, it was quite fun to kick the ball around but it felt a bit lacking with just this.
To add some extras we added in a double jump to not only have the ball use the air, but have the player be able to do more cool stuff

A frustration that came up while testing the first week prototype was that the ball and player were hard to track in the air.
While art and different contrasting colors could help with this, we decided to add a circle on the ground marking the position of both entities, so that its easier to track within the stadium.

Add in some obstacles, a practice goal and bam! Quite a fun prototype :)
Extra things we definitely want to look into are the changing of the map, visual feedback on goals and character abilities, and a more dynamic camera.
With these things added in we think this game would be very fun playing for the first time with your buddies, or hitting crazy cool shots from cool angles with your teammate! The feeling of easy fun vs high skill is there. 

Here is the video of our very first prototype! The ball is rolling B-).

Art:

It's research time, baby! There is no much of typical art stuff right now as we are still researching different possibilites and most efficient pipelines. We're not here to bore you to death with all the details so here's quick summary what we did during this week:

- in the process of researching the cell post-process shading and rendering pipeline in UE
- figured out the scale of arena and camera position
- figured out folder structure and naming convention
- stadium will be made out of modular pieces with props and decals on top of it 
- the exact artstyle is still under the questionmark, but we're leaning towards simplified ghibli style
- learnt how to use source control system 

It's time for actual fun part!

 However, the very first sketches of our eggcelent game characters are here! (This is a joke sketch, please don't take it too seriously)

Choose your team!

Are you going to be guardians of out native planet and fight as mighty penguins or maybe you prefer to use some eldritch blast of space  entities to dominate the Earth?  Challenge your best friend (the hardest part of playing this local co-op game obviously - having a friend) and make sure the Earth is yours!

Woah, you made it through whole document, I'm so proud of you!

Expect to see a new update every week around Wendesday or Thursday. Stay tuned and see you soon!