Introduction

Hi everybody, we are proud to present our project: SlipFights!

This devlog is attached to our second week in Game Projects at DAE Howest.

At the start of the week, we were faced with the fact that our first week hadn't been as productive as it should've been, so we needed new idea's fast.

We all noted down individual idea's to then refine them into more fleshed out or mixed together idea's

These were the 3 best idea's we had:

Refined Idea 2: Slide Sheriffs

This two ain’t town enough for the big of us

- 2 – 4 player game

- 2.5D shooter, confined to 1 arena (Top down)

- You get a contract on another player

- Movement is slippery, so aiming requires some skill

- They need to find the target and shoot them

- you can also challenge them to a duel

- There is a timer for the duel to start, shooting before a preset  timer runs out results in self elimination

- The player with the most hits performed before the time runs out is the winner!

- Choose from an array of skating gunslingers with their own skill/gun

- Rhythmic tapping of the sprint key increases the player speed

- There are unlimited reserve bullets

- Movement = XY axis + dodging and cover

- Aiming = XY axis aim

- Shot bullets have an impact on the characters movement

Refined Idea 2: Dive too Deep

- 2 player game

- Deep underwater horror game

- Split screen – each screen different colour and a shape outline that indicates if the player is the creature or the diver

- 3D

- The game is set in an ocean environment

- One player is a proportionally bigger sea creature hunting the other player for this reason the diver can escape the creature by swimming through smaller spaces

- The scuba diver is diving for treasure

- Monster protects the treasure

- The Monster wins if they attack the diver 3-5 times to eliminate them

- The diver wins if they find all the treasure and return to the safe point

- Diver has an air supply limit- if the creature attacks them then the air supply leaks causing a return to base as fast as possible to replenish the air supply

- To collect the treasure the player has to hold down a button and then carry the treasure back to the base, but they get noticeably slower when holding onto the treasure

- Usually, the diver is faster than the creature but once they are holding the treasure, they become slower than the creature

- Strategic use of holding onto the treasure and sometimes releasing it/dropping it before returning to the base to escape the creature or to go back to base to replenish air supply

- The monster can interact with the treasure and ‘push’ it back to its spot or just push it around to confuse the diver – they can only do that when holding down a button on the controller

- If the diver is holding the treasure the creature gets an ‘instinct’ that leads them towards the diver with the treasure but only if the diver is holding the treasure

- By ‘bumping’ into the diver, the creature gets a momentary set back- as if they hit their head and need a moment to recover but only a very short moment - like 1-2 sec

- Holding down a Button to hold/move treasure

- One controller joystick to move around and the other one to look around

Refined Idea 3: Up Top

- 2 – 4 player game

- Climbing a tree game

- 1-3 players are squirrels trying to climb a tree to get to the nut at the top

- 1 player is a large cartoony hand that tries to stop them and make them fall

- If at least one squirrel gets to the top the hand loses

- 2.5D

- The players can move around the entire tree

- The hand can ‘poke’ the branches to make them break making the squirrels fall

- Hand shouldn't get close to squirrels because if it does, the squirrel ‘bites’ the hand and that causes it to lose lives

- Towards the end of the game a storm appears and the squirrels need to be careful not to be blown away

- Moving against the wind becomes harder - slower movement for all players

- During the storm random objects fly across the screen and the hand can grab them to drop them right above a squirrel to make it fall

- Though movement with an object in hand becomes slower as well

Research

During this week, we were also looking to answer some questions:

- Is split screen out of scope for this course?

- How would the sliding movement work?

- What about the style?

- What game should we focus on?

Is split screen out of scope for this course?

We dabbled a bit into the realm of split screen in Unity to put "Up Top" into scope.

One of our team members made a vertical split screen for 3 players to test.

It worked wonderfully, however some concerns arose from inside the group questioning the tangibility of this concept if we would expand upon it

Ultimately we found out that split screen was not out of scope at all, but we would run into complexity issues with our own idea

How would the sliding movement work?

We made a simple prototype in Unity exploring impulse movement to put "Slide Sheriffs" into scope.

We found out that the movement feels very dynamic and fun!

A weapon was added to also simulate impulses caused by recoil.

The sliding movement proved to be potent when thinking about expansion on this project

What about the style?

In the group, there was a universal agreement to do a cartoony style because we want our target audience to be kids and adults.

Since we will have guns, a realistic style would be slightly too disturbing for younger kids.

In terms of character design and such, we have some more creating to do!

What game should we focus on?

Due to the complexity of the second idea, it was trashed quite fast.

All of us wanted to go more towards the first or third idea.

The prototype results helped us decide which idea was most interesting to put our effort into

Ultimately after counselling with our supervisors, Idea 1 came out on top!

It also got a new name: SlipFights!

See you all next week!

- The SlipFights team