Hello Gamers! This week we have some new progress on Footie Frenzy and we are excited to share it with you. Overall we did some more prototyping and A LOT of  writing for documentation of all the technical, art and core elements of the game.

Programming:

Hi everyone, I will be talking a bit about how this week went on the programming side and holy peck did it not go great. Well, I say that cause it’s 2:45AM anyhow what has happened.

Map: 

We have a map … well not a normal map, a map with the taking and losing territory. But damn did unreal not like this, first why can’t I find meshes at run time like how hard can it be?? Well anyhow the only way around this was to find the meshes before the game started so I did that, am I sad we had to do it like that, yes but it is what it is. With that we also could almost easily make a mesh swap system. If only we could just cast like in blueprints. But no that is totally not the case. Like you first need to cast it to a UChildActorComponent to then get the child actor class and then cast it to the wished class, mind blown. Well, that is the programming talk done with, at least it looks nice.

Questions we asked or came across

Now that the ball, player, and map are done will the next step be abilities and damn am I excited for that! Besides that, there will be a lot of paperwork so we will keep you up to date next week, but I need to sleep now. Good night!

Art:

Let's start with some exciting news, we are a step closer to finalizing our art style and figuring out the visuals of the game. We decided to go for a combination of some things we like, mainly focused on the game Bake 'n Switch and some influences of basic stylized games and Studio Ghibli style environments.

Furthermore we looked into the celshader and even post-process outlines. In the first image you can see a normal celshader made with the diffuse color, which means its flatshaded. This is cool, but we would like to combine the celshading with PBR, meaning only the shadows are going to be celshaded. In the second one, you can see a celshader combined with an outliner. For now only the outliner works well in here.  These aren't quite there yet, but could be a cool finish to our game eventually.

We made a blockout version of the arena, to visualize the size we had in mind. There is still stuff to be added, like the big tribune next to it and some obstacles, but we have the basics!

Whats Next?

Next week will be our last, for prototyping and refining the art bible, because after that the first sprint begins o_o. We are very excited to further develop this game and make it like the fun, and engaging game we envisioned!

See you all soon!