This is the 2nd week we are working on our Game Project, we have just come out of the brainstorming phase and are currently prototyping all off our ideas. After 1 week, we were able to test the following features.

• Why Unreal Engine 4 over Unity?

We prototyped physics in both Unreal and Unity since it is an important aspect of our game. In Unity, the physics did not meet our expectations and the hit detection was not always accurate, which is a big problem for our game. In Unreal, the physics worked without a lot of problems, coding it was simpler and felt more accurate. That is why we decided to work with UE4 instead of Unity.

Furthermore, Unreal Engine 4 is more artist friendly due to the blueprinting that Unreal has which allows artist to prototype and change assets themselves without the help of a programmer, they can also make content without needing to rely on the programmers.

Finally, whenever there is a bug in Unreal, you can change the engine due to it being open source, Unity is a closed source engine, this means if we have a bug that is related to the engine, we cannot fix this ourselves

• Camera

As we are making a dodgeball game, we have multiple choices of setting up the camera. The two main ways of setting up the camera for a game like this would be: a split-screen first/third person or a semi-top down camera. We chose for the latter since split screen sounds fun but if you do not have a big enough screen it really ruins the experience, whilst with top down we don’t have this issue . Also when using split screen first/third person, it would be a lot harder to dodge incoming balls. We do not have this issue with top down. In general top down is the cleanest solution for this project.

We were also thinking about rotating the camera towards the player that the ball, but this would not work since we will have multiple balls in the game at the same time.

• Conveyor Belt

Currently the way how we set up the conveyor belt is by using a dynamic spline mesh, this did not come without any issues. We started with using the ‘spline mesh blueprint’ that we used last semester and converted this to UE4 C++. This worked but the spline was not showing in the editor. This took a lot of time to figure out since the Unreal C++ documentation about this topic is scarce.

The next challenge was to move the spline mesh, which also caused some issues: when moving the mesh, the originally placed mesh did not get deleted. We found a way around this by creating the conveyor belt underneath the map and then moving the mesh up, this did the job.

All of this was done since you will be able to toggle the position of the conveyor belt by throwing a ball at a target.

• UI

We have been busy working out on how to make the UI as clear as possible without disturbing the players since the game will be quick and chaotic, you cannot be obstructed and distracted by the UI.

We made a preview of how the UI should look in-game, this is based upon the talks we have had during prototyping, this is not how it will look in the finished product but it shows how everything will be organized on the screen. 

• Animations

We were inspired by the low poly style of Pummel Party, that is why we tried to also create and rig a character in a similar style. But this did not go as smoothly as we would have hoped for.

When trying to auto rig the character with Mixamo, it gave an error telling us it was unable to map the existing skeleton. We searched online for solutions but none of these seemed to work. Then we tried to rig the character ourselves and tried to upload that, but this did not work either. We still have not found a solution yet for this problem.

• Sounds

We wanted to start pretty early on with creating a game sound library since we feel like it is a key component in user-feedback.

If we would start too late with this, we would not have the desired result for the finished projects because we would have spend less time on it and it would not sound as good as we want it to be.

That is why we already started gathering reference for some dodgeball and shop related sound effects

For next week:

• Animations
• Character
• Fortifications
• Pick Up Ball
• Art Bible
• Tech Document Feature List