Hello everyone!

We are a team of five students studying at Digital Arts and Entertainment in Kortrijk. 

Our team consists of two programmers: Jonathan Menschaert and Jonas Samyn, and three artists: Mikkel Blaase, Johan Pindeville and Giacomo Filotto. 

We will be giving a weekly report of our progress on the project to let you all know how it is going!

But what will our project be about? 

The only constraint was that it had to be a couch co-op game, we were free to choose the rest. After a lengthy brainstorming session, we landed on a game where players would take turns building and balancing a tower using blocks of various shapes, some being harder to balance than others. If you let the tower fall, you lose! 

Before we can start with this project, we first need to answer some questions we have related to both the art and the programming aspect of this game, so we need to research a couple of things. We will be comparing the Unity and Unreal engines for this.

First, we had to figure out which engine has better support for local multiplayer. This turned out to be Unity as that system is much easier to use and implement

However, local multiplayer support is not the only factor we needed in deciding the engine. 

Is Unity’s physics system, including the way it handles colliders sufficient for our project? The answer to this is yes, however Unreal still has the better system for this.

Considering it is a game about balancing, we also wanted to provide some support for an alternative controller, namely the Wii remote. We found a way to implement it in Unity, but not unreal, so if we go for unreal that idea will unfortunately have to be scrapped.

We then set out to prototype different artstyles, to get a tangible feel on our visuals, and the capabilities of the two engines. The end goal was to end up with a broad sample pool of varied visual styles.

The first artstyle we set out to explore was to be implemented in Unity. The goal was to create a toony, bright and fun artstyle, wherein the majority of the visual weight would lie in passing the 3D world into realtime pixelart. This artstyle is meant to promote a vibrant and playful atmosphere with fairly high energy, well fit for a medium-to-high intensity competitive playspace.

The second artstyle we decided to explore is based on a more retro-style pixel dithering effect, developed in Unreal through post processing shaders . The scope was to achieve a more simplistic and minimal approach to graphics, leaving room to explore a captivating way of interacting with the game. 

The third artstyle we decided to explore for a photorealism & PBR workflow. In this artstyle we tried to do a realistic artstyle.

First some basic PBR materials were created with Substance Painter, then a few wood, metal, glass, plastic and rubber materials and rubber for some material variation. Unreal engine was used to have a preview on how the materials look with the meshes.

In the coming week we will put the answers of our research together in a first proper prototype of the game.

Until next time!