Devlog 1: Humble beginnings

A introduction to SacriFetus..?

Yes, you read that correctly, SacriFetus is the game we are bringing to the public. So here is hello to all visitors and game enthusiasts, welcome to our page.

So, what are we all about. We are a group of 5 game students: 

• Sam Ferra                                  (Style artist)
• Britt Hellinckx                       (Style artist)
• Willem Baeyens                    (Game developer)
• Andre Ken De Decker       (Game developer)
• Jietse Hoste                            (Technical artist)

We plan on creating a crazy twist on the wave clearing type game which has taken the world by storm. In our game you are 2 cultists trying to revive their old god, but no god comes back without sacrifice. The only logical solution? Find some babies and bring them to your altar. Through careful wave management and good teamwork you need to collect your sacrifices and make your god rise. The core of our game will concist of running around, finding sacrifices and fighting off enemies with your swords. There will be a lot of risk taking, this game is balls to the wall action, so you go big or go home.

This first devlog will be the start of our game-making journey, we hope to bring you along on this amazing path, so thank you for tagging along~!

Artstyle

As a group we were all a really big fan of the 2D-3D style game, merging 2D elements with 3D environments and props. For 90% of the game this means that characters and small props will be 2D sprites and most bigger environment props will be 3D, same as the landscape itself. Our game will be a mood heavy game, with dramatic lighting, playing mostly with light and dark areas. This heavy contrast will also give us the opportunity to guide the player through light cues, making it easier for the player to navigate the map.

Our biggest inspiration for this artstyle is the well-loved game 'Octopath Traveler'

We prototyped a workflow to easily create spritesheets from every 3D animations. This will save us a bunch of time during our production sprints. We already prototyped some pixel shaders for our game which extra enhance our spritesheets, making it fully interactable with lights

Gameplay

For our gameprototype we really went for the core of the game, keeping it simple and clean. We got down the random waves spawning, picking up the sacrifice model and bringing it to the altar to sacrifice it. While playing this all felt smooth and felt fun. We think that persuing this further will make for a fun and high paced game.

Questions

As you do when you start a project like this, you have a lot of questions for your game, here are someof the ones we figured out.

Engine 

The big questions, what engine will we use. We realised quite quickly that our game is a mood heavy game, meaning that lighting and athmosphere is a clear must in our game. We feel like getting our desired result almost guarantees the use of unreal engine in this scenario. Both the amazing lighting capabilities and the newly added megalights will make this workflow much easier and streamlined. The game our project is based on was also created within unreal engine, giving us that final push that we needed. So for now unreal engine will be our engine of choice.

3D-2D workflow

As a group we quickly realised that our artists aren't used to working with pixel art and sprites, this is a big problem when you are going for a 2D-3D hybrid game. So we went lookingfor a solution. We found a very elegant solution, that many indiegames like deadcells for example also use. You basically render out your 3D animation in a very low resolution, baking every frame into a spritesheet. This will save us tons of time, making the life of our artists a lot easier.

Lighting interaction with spritesheets

Sprites can easily take up light, with only a few settings to your shader you can quickly make it be affected by the environment, but to really make it work well you want it to feel like it takes up the light. So  we prototyped a shader that can implement normal maps for our spritesheets, auto applying it to every frame of the flipbook. That way our flat sprites feel like they're part of the world and take up much more light

Animation and rigging

We're no animation experts, so finding a effecient way of rigging and animation our characters is crucial. Our first plan was to use Mixamo, which after some prototyping actually seemed to work. Normal characters weren't gonna be a problem, but ou sacrifice on the other hand might have been. But after importing a baby model, letting it auto rig and putting some animations on it, we quickly found out this was more than fine.

Following week

So, what's next in our adventure. The following week will contain a lot of prototyping. Getting even closer to our desired game mechanics, figuring our way in unreal to recreate the octopath traveller style and getting right down to the nitty gritty of our game.

I wish to thank you for reading this and keeping up with our game. Our team is ready to work hard to complete this game, and deliver a shocking, but also shockingly fun game to your hands. 

Thanks again, and see you next week~!