Devlog 2: Fighting with unreal and refining the art

This weeks devlog we dont need a introduction, you know us and we're ready to go at it again.

This week was packed full of work, ranging from unreal prototypes to refining our artstyle and figuring out the nity gritty of our game.

Unreal prototyping

This week we were fully focused on creating our camera system for our game. so we made a prototype of our camera. The wanted behavior is that the camera views both players at the same time, targeting the centerpoint between the two. Also important is to prevent the players from moving offscreen, in this prototype the players are limited to a smaller area than the viewport but this is configurable.

 Last week, we created a game mechanics prototype in Unity to showcase our core gameplay. Since I’m already familiar with Unity and had reusable code, it allowed me to iterate quickly and get a working prototype up and running in no time. This week, I started from scratch in Unreal Engine, initially using Blueprints before converting the logic to C++. So far, I’ve implemented a character that can move, rotate, and perform a basic attack, slashing enemies in front of them.

Artstyle

The next thing on our agenda was the artstyle, getting down to the nitty gritty of our game.

Our first order of business is the characters.

The colour platte of our main characters had a couple of restrictions to begin with. Firstly, the colours obviously needed to fit with the cult aspect. No player should be confused if they are in a cult or not. To show this, we chose a main colour in the red hue range. The second aspect exists because of the first one. Even though the characters needed to look like they are in a cult, they don't need to look otherworldly. Their colour palette still needed to fit in with the others. Lastly, because we have 2 players, we needed a way to easily see which player is which character. The easiest way to do that is to give each character an unique main colour. To still have the characters match, this main colour would be the secondary colour of the other player. 

Our enemy colour palette didn't have as much restrictions, the only needs where that it fit in with the world but also didn't fit with the players colour palette.

Environment

Our second thing on the agenda was most definetly the envrionment combined with the modd and ligthing.

We focused on defining all the parameters that are needed to create the levels itself. We decided to go for a nordic style 2D-HD look, combined with pixelated textures

Our environment will also be shaped by vegitation and props. These props we also defined.

Mood and lighting

Lastly we went over the modd and lighting, we ecided to go for a nightscene, playing with light and darkness to create and earie atmosphere. by keeping the saturation low on the normal light and keeping it high on the fires and lanterns we can create this visually appealing look witch will for sure capture anyones attention.

We also heavily prototyped the lighting this week, diving deep into the process ofhow octopath traveler was made.

Using a combination of a basic base light, combined with a ton of post processing we are getting close to our desired result

So here's a before and after:

Character sprites

We also did a quick testrun of the character modeling workflow to make sure everything worked correctly. The mixamo did well and we are able to save a lot of time making our spritesheets and animations this way. However we did realise that for the wanted result we need to add on the characters before we render a toonshader. Which should be easily achievable and adjust some of the colors. We are gonna be focusing on getting a better result. But we are very happy we did this so we can adjust the workflow for the future.

Another week packed with things to do, but we made it through.

Next week will see much of the same, more prototyping and more defining the artstyle.

I think you all again for this week, helping us and following along on this journey.

Thank you all from the SacriFetus team and see you next week~!