Hello world!

Welcome to our first devlog for Wicked Warehouse! We will be making this game for our school Game projects course. 

Our team

Our team consists of:

Jesse De Groot (Environment Artist)

Hey hey, I'm Jesse. Pretty much a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of 3d artist with a slight focus and bias for environments. Set dressing, 3d asset creation and rigging is what I look forward too in this game!

Joao Desager (Tech/3D Artist)

Hi I'm João. A technical artist and 3d modeller. I'll be taking care of most of the 3d assets in the game, as well as any fancy material wizardry for the game.

Niyash Khadka (2D/3D and character Artist)

Hello my name is Niyash. A 2D artist and also a 3D modeler. I will be handling most of the 2D work and hand painted texture and also 3d assets.

Tim Vermant (Programmer) 

Hi I'm Tim. I'm a programmer and will be handling the implementation on our game designs into Unity!

Tristan Wauthier (Programmer). 

Ola, I'm Tristan. I'll be programming for our game along with Tim. I have a big interest into AI, love programming and solving problems! :)

We are very excited to be working together and look forward to making our game!

Art

Our artists started work on the Art bible, these are some of our current design choises.

- Environment/Assets Color palette

Our game environment and assets will be using flat colors with gradient swatches to give it more of a pop to the environment. The closer the object the more saturated it will be. To add depth there will be an atmospheric perspective to add depth. As for the characters' color pallet: It will be the most saturated thing on the whole level. The player will have a fluorescent color. Players will be in different colors to avoid confusion.

- Character proportion

The proportion of character will be cartoony and was inspired by Totally reliable delivery service and fall guys. However, the height of the character will be realistic in size in co-relation with our props in the environment The proportion is about 3 boxes tall and is 30/70 since the torso and legs are almost the same. Environment and assets: The size of our environment will be similar to overcooked. The size of the level can be bigger than the play area to add depth.

- Shapes

As for the shapes we came to the conclusion that a low-detailed blocky environment would probably work best. With “Korean Bevels”, a method of chamfering and softening the right edges, we could easily get a softer but cubic look to our game whilst still providing easier UV islands for later texturing. The shapes will take in mind that we’re going to use gradient swatches on a texture sheet to be more resourceful. The characters however will be more roundish and more smoothed out. We’ll try to avoid hard edges but still keep them somewhat low detailed but more vibrant to pop more in the created environments.

- Lighting

For the lighting we played around a bit in Unity to see what our possibilities were with the URP Shader Pipeline that we will use. Our goal is to get soft shadows and an overall well lit environment that has a shadeless feeling to it. As for the technicality, we looked into Light Probes which we personally think might be really worth it for our indoors setting that we will create. We think it is more resourceful to use them and use baking methods and have real-time lighting too. As to how and what we still have to decide on what feels the best.

 Coding

For this week we worked on the start of our prototype having the main mechanics being the moving around of the player and the ability to pick up boxes, stack the boxes on top of eachother and then dropping the bottom box on the ground by pressing spacebar. For now the player picks up the box when walking into it but later we might have a pickup range with a button linked. While the boxes are on the floor or the player is dropping/throwing them away, they have a rigidbody component added which means they have physics applie and will fall to the ground. When the player picks up a box it gets destroyed in the level and a new box gets spawned (stacked on the previous box if they are already carrying one) without a rigidbody.  This demo is also already up for download :).

Additional Research questions

- Active ragdolls

We looked into implementing active ragdolls, to give the game a cartoony vibe. However, after some prototyping and research we realized that this would be too much to implement within our 12-week timeframe with only 2 programmers.

- Camera

We're also looking into our camera to try and find the best angle. Right now we're set on a topdown view with the possibility of adding a splitscreen. But this can all change later.

We do hope you guys are looking forward to playing our game! You will be hearing of use next week for another devlog. 

Thank you.