Hi everyone!

Welcome to our 2nd devblog. I am super hyped about this project and hope you are too! This week ill tell you more about our engine choice, struggles we had, artistic direction and why you need this game is gonna rock!

Last week the other 2 programmers still had to get used to using Unreal and Unity felt faster and easier, but we kept trying and now everyone feels pretty good about working in Unreal. All of our biggest questions we wanted to test in the prototyping phase were answered over the course of this week. Using Unreal lifted alot of the weight of the shoulders of our sole artist who is more experienced inside the Unreal engine. I personally also prefer the work environment of Unreal and alot of the build-in components are perfect for some of the mechanics we are gonna implement. 1 programmer was doubting at first cause he didn't know how good Unreal would go for him, but after a couple of hours working in the engine he felt more confident. then after hearing Unreal c++ is a highly sought for competence the decision to go with Unreal was not a hard one anymore.

We also fleshed out more what we want to go for concerning the art and feel of the game, and honestly we are all happy with the style our artist came up with.

Here ya go, a little showcase of our little fluffball player character. You can also see the toon shader made by our artist.

This week we further implemented character controls so now he can move around, jump and even use a force push to push away players in it's vicinity. It is of course just a prototype so it does not really feel smooth yet but we just wanted to test the mechanic itself anyway. We like the mechanic and so will refine it more during upcoming development weeks.

Look at that! Now imagine it being polished!

We also created a first really dirty and quick version of a pickup:  The freeze bomb (well right now it's a ray but let's not go to deep into technicalities here) which temporarily stuns the player that get's hit. It's mechanically wise on of my favorites and we have some fun ideas for it that you'll get to see in upcoming weeks.

After playing around with our moving camera speed, we also finally found some satisfying results.

Besides that we now also have a playable prototype in Unreal testing out these mechanics, so definitely check that out!

1 of our more difficult mechanics: The ghost dead players can turn into has been tested in a couple of ways and certainly feels interesting , but will undergo more changes during development.

We have a lot of faith in our project and believe it is gonna be tons of fun when you can push each other into deadly boulders rolling down the hill, freeze each other and wave them goodbye or pass them with the old but gold grappling hook.

Here you can see our player model inside the modeling program

And here you can see it inside the engine but without the toon shader