Devlog 3: Documentation and game prototype

Welcome back for another week of our game project!

This week was a less exciting one, focussing more on documentation and laying out the fundamentals of our project.  Getting all our documentation in order, ranging from our artbible to our GDD and tech documents. These have been fully worked out. our foundations are layed out and our artists are fully prepared on rolling into production and cranking out the best quality products we can for this project.

On the other hand we layed out our gameplay foundations, creating a fun and playable build. One which goes through our whole gameplay loop showcasing all our fundamentals. So lets go right ahead and dive into some specifics.

Unreal prototype

As you all know our game a explanation of our prototype is not needed, but if you're new here, here's a little reminder. 

The goal of our game is of course to sacrifice babies, step one to sacrificing a baby is finding a baby. Luckily these poor babies have been left unattended around the world. Once you've found a baby you can simply pick it up with a button press. Since babies can be tough to handle a player who holds one gets slowed down. They also change visually for clarity. After travelling back to the altar you can sacrifice the baby; getting one step closer to summoning your evil God. After repeating this 9 more times you win the game. 

We've talked about what you need to do, now let's talk about what hinders you in your noble quest. Small groups of enemies will spawn around the players. These enemies run towards the nearest player; dealing damage on contact. The players can fend off these foes with a simple melee attack that can hit multiple enemies at the same time.

So after this little reminder:

This week, we took a big step forward by combining all our separate projects into a cohesive, playable demo prototype to showcase before full-scale production.

One of our major achievements was implementing the sacrificing mechanic. We created a simple Baby Actor and an Altar Actor, which form the core of the game’s progression system. But a game needs tension, so we also built a basic enemy system to complete the gameplay loop.

Enemies now spawn in groups scattered across the map, relentlessly hunting down the player and dealing damage when they get too close. To make this work, we developed an Enemy AI Controller and an Enemy Character. Both the player and enemies share a Health Interface, which we added to a Base Character class that they both inherit from. This setup ensures our health and damage systems are consistent across all characters.

Creating a simple HUD to display health was also harder than expected. Setting up UMG (Unreal Motion Graphics) in C++ was tricky. It turns out, if you don’t change your build folder to include UMG, you end up with linker errors. It was a debugging spree, trying to figure out which libraries to include and which were exclusive to Blueprints.

But the struggle paid off. After a lot of debugging and head-scratching, we now have a playable game. It’s rough around the edges, but it works.

We started this week with prototyping the sacrifice mechanics in unreal, this went pretty smooth and after a few hours and about as many crashes i had a working prototype. After that we started integrating previous made prototypes with Ken's prototype. This was harder than expected, in particular the code that enabled 2 controller input didn't work at all. We had assumed it would be an easy copy paste but it took a lot of changes to get it working. Overall we're happy with the progress this week and feeling more confident in my unreal skills each week.

Lighting prototype

One final thing we did last week was further enhance our lighting setup, finalising what we had and completing the look. I'd like to say that we got pretty close in achieving that 2D-HD look. Most of our light processing happens in the post process volume. Our most important nodes are the DOF, Bloom and colorcorrection. Here's our final result:

Thank you all again for joining us this week, our plans for the next week are finally going into production.

This game needs to get ready, so themoment we have aproval from our higher ups we can start our first ever sprint.

Our main focus will be, improving the game mehcanics, creating our characters and creating our envrionment.

As usual, thank you for joining and see you next week~!