Intro

Now that the core idea of the game is more clear, the team has been diving deeper in solving issues and answering important gameplay and art questions through prototyping, so that we can make the fundamentals of the game as fleshed and as fun as possible. Besides that the art team has been diving deeper in both the possibilities of Unity and developping an art style that is best suited to bring everything to life.

Prototyping

Multiplayer

The multiplayer prototype works relatively well now. Players can join and spawn in on different locations and interact with each other. Some minor bugs here and there are still present, like being able to spawn on the same location. But this will be ironed out soon. Although not shown in the gif below the game can have 4 players at the same time. For demo reasons it's just 2 players.

Movement

The movement has been tweaked further and combined with the lance controls. Playing with parameters of the system will allow us to easily tweak all these physics related elements. Hitting eachother now applies knockback based on with what part of the weapon the player was hit by. Next up is linking player momentum to the positioning of the lance and the knockback that it applies.

The lance is now momentum based which helps it feel a lot heavier.  With this we mean just a simple acceleration system that makes input have a slow build up and after releasing the lance will still move a bit.  For now as well this is also how we will make the player turn by swinging the stick a bit too much that our character has to turn to keep on his feet.

Art

Art prototypes

Further experimenting was done with the unity shader systems. We exlored further how particle effects, animations and rigging can be done. The water shader test has been finished together with a test version of a vertex painter shader to blend textures together.

Art bible

The initial version of our art bible contained analysis of other games'art styles that will inspire ours. Based on that analysis we have a better idea of the how environments, UI, RFX, textures and characters could look like. Now we are diving deeper into how to apply this to create something that works well for our game.

Sound bible

A first draft of the sound bible has been made. It covers how for sound we will go into a modern cartoon style and some other fun interactive idea's we want to try. One of these elements is the crowd that will be watching you fight it out in the ring. The main idea is pretty simple that with most actions we'll have a crowd cheer or boo some players.  But an extra stretchgoal we have with this mechanic is that the crowd will pick a favorite and cheer that player on more. So instead of cheering for the hit of player 2, they are more sad that player 1 got hit in the first place. So we are looking for fun ways to immerse the players within the world.