Introduction:

For this week the focus was on further prototyping our game, with a focus on figuring out what our level will look like and how it is designed, and how the lighting within in it will be set. This was primarily handled by our two artists Matteo and Tommy, who both worked hard to answer these questions and give us beautiful screenshots of their process and final results. Tommy as well, has been hard at work creating the art bible for our game and settling on the overall art style and some of the designs that will be within the game.  

For the programmers, we've been hard at work getting the basic general gameplay of our game right, answering questions about how our camera will look like, what the splitscreen  will be like and the amount of seperate screens that we would like to support, and finally the movement of our character where we had to settle on what the game feel will be for the player while they're moving around within the level. Additionally, some work was done on getting a start of how our NPC's within will behave, their patrol routes and deviations that they'll will make within it when they heard a noise or spotted a player.

Art section:

Lighting Part:

 This is the result of the work and experimentation our lighting engineer, Matteo, had done for this week. Of course this is far from the final product that we are going for but this perfectly describes what kind of feel we want to go for the lighting within our level and some of these light settings we can easily reapply to next week final game design prototype. For now, it shows the contrast we want to achieve with the darkness of the level and light, making it obvious for the players which parts are lit and might cause them to be spotted if they stand on it. With that also getting the darkness right (as strange as that sounds) so that you still feel like you're creeping through a dark manor but that you can still see your player character within it.

For those interested, here's a checklist from Matteo on what he completed for this week for our lighting.

- Tried different lighting options in engine, so far sadly mostly with issues. 

- Got skylight to work. 

- Settings for directional light are set 

- Made basic light setup in engine with skylight and tried out the post process package, full light actor (light source, custom texture masks,        colliders fitted to illuminated area).

Here are some of the early prototypes that Matteo made for you to gawk at, as you can see there definitely was a lot of progress made. Certainly for someone that is doing this for the first time in Unity 6.

Design Part:

When it comes to our level design, our Tommy and Cristian spend an entire evening discussing with much gusto how our layout to our level will look like, taking inspiration from mainly New England and 19th century french manors on where and how each of the rooms and hallways will look like as well as considering the game aspect so that it fits our gameplay needs and is a level that is fun for the player to play and move within it. They made a good-looking layout drawing almost to an architectural level (much to the annoyance of Cristian).

Using this draw up, our two artists got hard to work making a block-out and 3D model for us programmers to start implementing within a Unity prototype project.  However, the future for this layout is still undecided, we'll have to rigidly playtest it to find any possible changes that we will have to make it so that its hopefully will be even more fun for you guys to eventually play within it. Here are the two models that our artists made for us.

Tommy, along with the blockout, worked hard during the weekend to progress wonderfully through the Art Bible, creating a clear vision for us on how the game will look like, and hopefully for all of you to start getting an idea on what you can visually expect of the eventual finished products. Meeting our discussed expectations and theme of our game, Tommy created a casual and simplistic looking art style that communicates to you that this game will be pure fun, fun and fun! Taking inspiration from other games that aspired to this theme but also old looney tunes cartoons to get a mischievious feeling to our game. Below here I'll let you take a sneak peak at some of the pages within this document.

Programming Section:

We on the programming have also not been slacking on work, we've started working together now on a single prototype project, learning the many benefits we're getting with using our Management Tool as well as the many possible mistakes that we can make it (Oh boy, were there some close calls this week). Besides this, we made some great headway settling on the overal design of our game and the many mechanics and systems that will be needed to implement within our finished product, and putting them all in a perfect design model for us to refer back to and give a clear vision to each of the mechanic's inner workings. Here's already a little view of it, and little spoiler to some of the features we might be thinking of adding (how fun).

The camera and player have been settled on and a prototype of it has been implemented, there was some bickering on the type of camera but we've settled on making it a rotatable camera, hopefully giving you future players enough control over your vision to spy out all the loot and dangers that you will find within our game. Then our Raphael worked on implementing a cool idea of his own, not really the concept but that we should add it, variable movement. Letting your really slow and silently sneak around the mansion, Metal Gear Solid style. Hopefully this will give our player's more of a control over their movements and really letting you get into the mindset of a sneaky robber.

Though we're unable to show it to you just yet, we've also implemented the splitscreen system into our game, settling on how seperate screen are going to be implemented and where they are going to be positioned. There's been another discussion about the amount of players that we will allow to play our game, the obvious answer is just having 2 to 4 players that are able to play a round but immediately questions about spacing and positioning started coming up, certainly when it comes to 3 players. Either the screen for the third player will have to be weirdly stretched out or we will have to add empty spaces to our screen layout which might ruin the look that we are planning to go for it. This was something that we had answered with this prototype, settling on either 2 or 4 players. However, a new question arised, why don't we just settle on 4 players since the mansion level is amde with the idea of 4 players running around and with 2 players the map might feel very empty?

If you have 2 cents to input on our dilemma don't be afraid to post a comment below this vlog. Maybe your input might just help us out.

Cristian helped us make great headway with getting the NPC behaviour for our guards to work perfectly, implementing a navmesh on the level for us to use and facilitate the many other behaviours that the guards will have, such as adding their noise detection ability whereby if you make a loud bang somewhere in a room, a guard will be able to hear and run to inspect it, and if you're still stuck in that room then may god have mercy on you because god knows the legal system won't. In addition to adding some more other complex behaviours, we hope to make a very thrilling experience for the player in avoiding the guards and make them a real thorn in your side.

Along with these main big two, there are also some prototypes on some of the pick ups within the level and a laser trap with their moving and blinking behaviour. These aren't yet too spectacular to look at but we'll definitely show it off when there's something more there for you to see. 

That will be it for this weeks devlog, we hope you found it interesting watching our work process and some of the behind the scenes to this student game project. Come back next week to (hopefully) see a nice and finished Game Design Playtesting prototype and have a build for you to try out and play in it.