Introduction

ALL FISHERMEN ABOARD!! And welcome to our game project for Howest DAE.

In our team for this project, we have 3 coders: Samir Vertahovs, Ivans Minajevs and Jonas Christiaens. We have one tech artist Kris Catteau, and two style artists Michelle Bogdanova and Megan Veldt. Our goal is to create a fun pvp couch game where you compete against your friends on who the best fisherman is.

Our game is a fast-paced chaotic fishing game. A competitive party game where up to four players race to catch fish, turn them in for points and sabotage your opponents.

As some newly hired fishermen at the pier-side restaurant {restaurant name not yet decided on}, your job is simple: catch fish and deliver them to the restaurant for points. But there's a catch, the other players are out to steal your fish, knock you into the water and sabotage you for every step of the way!

So after explaining the game idea we will now go on with the update on the research we did this week both coding wise and art wise.

Coding

Should we use Unity or Unreal Engine?

 We're still weighing our decision between Unreal Engine and Unity, both the technical features—like minigames, ragdoll physics, and split screen—and the amount of creative liberty our artists have. One of our artists raised a key point in favor of Unreal, saying that having experience with its art tools has yielded them better results and a more streamlined workflow. They created apprehensions that Unity transition might entail a steep learning curve, sacrificing visual quality and making current work less efficient. Ultimately, our decision will balance these technical capabilities against the experience of the team and long-term creative vision.

How can we figure out the ragdoll system?

Unreal Engine 5: Unreal Engine 5 includes a preset for basic ragdoll physics, simplifying the process considerably. Creating a self-balancing ragdoll is straightforward: you can integrate the Physical Animation Component to seamlessly blend skeletal animations with physics simulations. Additionally, using physics constraints, you can define movement limits for each bone, allowing precise control over each part of the ragdoll. The only C++ requirement is to enable physics.

Unity: Here's an example of ragdoll physics implemented in Unity. Unlike Unreal Engine, which automates the process based on the skeletal mesh, Unity offers more granular control over individual bones. Additionally, a wealth of YouTube tutorials on ragdoll physics highlights Unity’s popularity for developing these types of games.

How would the fishing mechanic look?

This game has a main mechanic of catching fish, so we have to think of a few ways players can do that without it feeling repetitive. Meaning that we have to create 3-4 small minigames that will appear when trying to catch a fish, being chosen randomly. This implies there is a need to decide, whether to make a game as a part of the UI, or as a part of 3D game space, a game object.

Games have to small and simple, and not be that much attention grabbing, that it would hinder the playthrough for the ones not participating in it. Thus, such ideas as pattern matching and memory mini-games - would be too much.

Instead, ideas like a "press with a correct timing" and "button mashing" sound much more appealing. Minigames still should be able to fit at a very small screen space, as well as be short enough (no longer than around 5 seconds to complete if done perfectly), as players need to be able to complete them rapidly.

How time consuming is creating a splitscreen game?

In both engines split screen is achievable through very few steps. What we have to think about is what feel or gameplay this will create for our game. Will the small screens obstruct the view and play style of our players, or will it not impact our gameplay too much.

Unreal Engine 5: Unreal makes setting up split-screen pretty straightforward. The engine automatically supports local multiplayer, so adding a second player is as simple as spawning one at the start of the game. Once a second player joins, Unreal splits the screen for you, and each player gets their own view. The tricky part is making sure controls don’t overlap—each player needs their own controller, and Unreals system handles that automatically.

Unity: Unity gives us more control over how split-screen looks, but it takes a few extra steps to set up. Instead of an automatic split, we need to manually create multiple cameras and position them correctly on the screen.

Art

What will the artstyle look like?

We decided to go with a stylized chonky artstyle with alot of big and round shapes to make everything feel cute. We also want to sculpt some of the hero assets and character to make it feel more detailed and crisp.

How do we model the character so that it is ragdoll friendly?

We did some research to know as artist what we have to keep in mind when we start with the character model since we are gonna use ragdolls in the game. We have to keep to the low poly rules and techniques we’ve been taught and keep an eye out for areas of the model that will be bending / deforming and give those extra topology / loops . Lastly try to keep the topology clean, simple and uniform and always keep proportions in mind.

What pipeline should we use?

We thought about a pipeline that interests all of the artist and since we have two style minor artists who are confident in sculpting and a tech artist who has done alot of baking and substance painter we decided to go for a pipeline that first makes a mid poly model that on flat surfaces can have triangles to speed up the model process > to sculpting (sculpting close to the model so that we dont have to retopologize) so we only add scratches and simple damages while sculpting > uv unwrap > texturing with a master material already created with a standard curvature map for edges, ambient occlusion and a top to bottom gradient to fake light and make it pop more.

Artbible?

We also started working on the artbible and defining the artstyle and rules more.

Future plans!!

• Finishing the artbible
• Expanding research on vfx
• Testing the implementation of additional mechanics