Devlog 1

Introduction

We are a team of 2 programmers and 2 artists from DAE HoWest working on our course of Group Projects. The Programmers are Bert and Leander, The artists are Lana and Steve.

Have you ever gotten so mad at your boss that you just wanted to  break everything around you? Then you're in luck! Our game "Rage in the Office"  will be a local multiplayer game that gives you the opportunity to vent that anger (without getting fired). And since it's a game with friends, why not annoy them a little ;). So look forward to destroying as much as you can.

This week we've been researching on ways to implement our desired game mechanics, both for art and code. So here's a bit of that research:

Art

Deferred or Forward Rendering?

The most important question to figure out this week was to decide whether we should use deferred or forward rendering for our game. We did some testing in Unreal Engine and experimented with different materials and lights and decided to go with deferred rendering.

In our rendering tests our observations are that with deferred rendering the materials shaders look overall better. There are visible bounce lights on the objects and environment, as well as light on the environment form the emissive material, things that are not present in the forward rendering example. Additionally, deferred rendering gives out more options for dynamic lighting and using multiple lights in our scene. Taking into consideration that our game takes place in an interior office scene that can have multiple lights as well as objects like computers screens that emit light, deferred seems like the best option.

Animation:

We also looked at how to implement animations from Mixamo.com. Mixamo’s library has a lot of  ready-made character animations which we could use in our game. Still  there are some limits, so some character animations we would probably need to animate by ourselves.

Coding

In what game engine will we work?

Since we were hoping to implement physical destruction of objects leaving debris, we were inclined to go with unreal due to hardware intensity. We also have more confidence in working with unreal and have worked with unreal solely with C++. This in a consideration since the school project doesn't allow the use of blueprint/scratch style coding for this assignment.

Another reason we want to use unreal is due to the fact that it has a well implemented Nav Mesh. This allows us to have "co-workers" aka NPC's running about in the office as an obstacle. We were also planning on having a boss walk a path before returning to the safety of his office so having  Nav Mesh is definitely useful.

How will we interact with objects?

We wanted to be able to pick items up so we thought of using the Advanced Interaction System Plugin because it allows for ease of use interaction and popups that appear when in range above the item of choice. Since this is one of the core mechanics we want to implement in regards to player vs player interactions, we want to get this right. Because who doesn't love throwing chairs at your friends? Wait.. Don't answer that..

How do we create a satisfying destruction? 

As before mentioned we wanted to have object physically fall apart since our game is focused around destruction, since particles alone wont allow for that satisfying crunch. So we are planning to use chaos destruction on all of the destroyable objects. Since this can be performance heavy we wanted to test this, to see if its manageable.  

Thanks for reading and hopefully till next week!