Devlog 2

For the new readers welcome to the chaos and for the other readers welcome back!

Documentation 

Game Design Model 

We got started on our Game Design Model on Hacknplan. When making a game, it is important to have a good and clear idea of what you're actually going to do, and how you are going to get to the desired result. Every question should be answered, and every detail written out. This is where the Game Design Model comes into play. It is a useful tool to neatly organize everything, so that’s what we started doing. We gave every aspect of the game its own chapter to refer to later. A chapter contains a description of the current subject, along with everything that needs to be done to get it working. For example, a chapter about the player’s object interaction will first describe in detail how a player can interact with an object, what happens when a player does so, what we (the designers) have to do in order to make this work… At the end, there is a brief summary of requirements for the designers, such as required variables, animations, sound effects… This way, when production starts, we don’t have to waste any time asking questions on how we will implement certain mechanics, no, we simply refer to the Game Design Model where we have everything we need already written out for us. In the future, once we get to production, this will be a huge time save.

Artbible 

We started on one of the most important documents for any artist that's working in our team, the Art Bible. After gathering a hugeee amount of references we were able to create a good moodboard and go over all the other topics. The goal for this week was to get a headstart on the artbible and to do that we went over about half of the topics that need to be discussed. We have a solid moodboard, went over which environmental and asset shapes and colors we wanna use, how our camera should be and the shapes and colors of all our characters.

Experimentation

Production

We continued work on the test environment so you can actually interact by right clicking and blast the objects away from you. as well as starting on the underlying construction. This week we implemented a "destructible" interface for checking if the objects you hit have health, so they could take a few punches before exploding in a million bits.  We also made a BaseDestructableObject so we can easily add new and different objects to the game when we want.

Complications

Due to that fact that field system and chaos destruction in unreal is primarily made to be used in blueprints, it has been extra challenging  (for those who have forgotten or haven't read the first devlog, we have to work solely in unreal for our code). We have run into a problem that when we try to include the Field System datatypes it comes with linker errors.  Using a workaround might be possible but we somehow have to be able to assign the spawned anchorfield actor  (stops destruction in field) to the geomerty collection actor (the chaos object) so we can delay the actual destruction till the object runs out of health.

Thank you all for reading and hope to see you next week!