Hello and welcome to our first of many Devlogs!

For the past 2 weeks we've been brainstorming, sketching, making blockouts, researching and testing a whole lot of things to start on the base of our game!

Our brainstorming started of with many ideas, but in the end, we got stuck on 2.
1. An Overcooked style game, where you are a group of pirates being attacked by a kraken, while trying to keep your ship afloat
2. A Gang Beasts inspired arena combat game with ragdoll physics, where you fight using the right joystick to drag your arm around, rather than a single button.

In the end, we decided that the Gang Beasts game would be more fun, especially for a couch coop!

Our artists have been looking into the render pipeline between Unreal Engine 5 and Unity, as well as cel shading / toon shading and finding out which artstyle would be best for our game.

Render Pipeline conclusion:

While it is possible to achieve cel shading and line art in both deferred and forward rendering, the small scale and simple lighting of the scene would make forward shading the more optimized choice.

Unity's URP is the most fitting of Unity's Render Pipelines, as our game will not be photorealistic, so using the HDRP would hold no advantages and would most likely only impact performance unnecessarily.

Unreal Engine and Unity are equally capable of achieving the appropriate look of the game and the difference in performance is negligible. The render feature stack of the URP is theoretically more powerful than Unreal Engine's post processing materials, however we were unable to implement it. Unreal Engine therefore seems the marginally superior choice. 

Cell Shading / Toon Shading:
For this, we've looked how easily it could be implemented in both the engines.

Here's an image as to what it would look like in UE5:

The art style was more difficult to implement in Unity, but here is what the style looks like in Unity:

Here is an alternative technique in Unity:

Here is the same technique above combined with a custom line art texture:

all of the above come with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Here's an animated water shader with foam:

Artstyle:
We've looked at many artstyles including:
- Untitled Goose Game
- Gorn
- Bomb Rush Cyberfunk / Jet Set Radio
- Pummel Party
- And just about any Landfall game
The conclusion is that sticking to simple shapes and using only a base colour is the way to go! 


Our programmers have done  a lot of research! From buoyancy prototyping, to a Smash Brothers style health system and an active ragdoll system.
The main conclusion out of this was that Unity is the best engine for the programmers as it has the most documentation out of the 2 engines

Here's a quick look into the research one of our programmers has done in Unity:

And here's also a quick gif of our buoyancy prototype:

Now, there's only 1 more thing to talk about and that is the level design!
We've gone through a few  iterations but in the end stuck to a large arena on the edge of a castle wall.
All of this is currently made in UE5 as it was easier for our level designer to work in something they're familiar with.

Our UI for now is very simple but shows a clear way as to what we'd want out of it, very simple, yet recognisable and readable. So the player won't be confused which health bar is theirs.