Hello World! 

Welcome to our very first devlog! We are a team of game developers who are thrilled to share our latest project with you. Our team consists of 5 students from Digital Arts and Entertainment at Howest in Kortrijk, Belgium.  We are composed of 3 artists (Akio, Jerke, and Martijn) and 2 developers (Jef and Arne). We all have no prior experience developing video games. Which makes this our first-ever project!

To get us started, I believe some proper introductions might be in order.

Hello everyone! My name is Arne,  one of the 2 programmers working on this project. I love technical challenges and I have a bit of experience with app development. My favorite area of expertise is engine development.

Hi! My name is Jef, the second developer our group. I've always had a passion for video games and I have some experience in web development. I am always eager to learn more about game development and my favorite area of expertise is gameplay programming.

Hi, I am Jerke and with a passion for particles and sculpting I will make it my mission to dazzle your eyes in this game project.

Hey! My name is Akio, a technical artist with a strong interest in procedural workflows, particularly in Houdini.

Hello! How are you doing? My name is Martijn, an artist who loves taking a deep dive into environment art. By sheer determination and pure will I am sure that we can deliver beautifull, engaging and ultimately fun arenas to this project!

Over the past few weeks, we have been brainstorming and ideating on five different genres and concepts, resulting in some exciting ideas. After some time of exceptionally deep thinking, we finally decided on what game we wanted to pursue. In this devlog, we will be sharing our progress as we develop our space rugby-type game, which we will call Super Galaxy Rugby for now. As you might notice, there has been a lot of thought behind the choice of name. 

We will feature tactical gameplay elements to inspire unique counterplay mechanics. On top of that, we are exploring environmental concepts, including various arenas with dynamic terrain changes that will add a new level of strategy to the game!

Our mission is to create an epic gaming experience that brings people together, fosters friendly competition, and, most importantly, delivers loads of fun. We'll be brainstorming, designing, coding, testing, and tweaking every aspect of our game, from the concept to the characters, from the levels to the graphics and gameplay.

We answered questions like, what engine are we going to use? (Unreal Engine) And what is the best software that suits our pipeline? Even questions like what metric system are we using in the creation of our space rugby game are important to answer.

Below we listed 4 questions we had to research to get us closer to the production phase of Super Galaxy Rugby.

Deferred or forward rendering?

For this project, we will be using deferred lighting. Choosing deferred lighting for our game is a great decision because it allows us to have dynamic lighting and transparency in our game simultaneously. Overall, choosing deferred lighting for our game is an excellent choice, allowing us to achieve the desired visual effects while maintaining good performance and providing a more immersive experience for our players.

Rootmotion vs non-rootmotion

Upon delving further into animation, because we do not have much prior experience with animation, we discovered that there are two distinct approaches to animation. The first option involves utilizing rootmotion, which involves extracting any transformations applied to the player capsule from the animation and directly applying them to the player collision capsule. Conversely, the second option involves forgoing rootmotion, which means that while the animation plays and the model execute the movements, the player collision capsule remains stationary. If the player capsule position isn't manually adjusted, the model will snap back to its original position after the animation concludes.

We're probably not going to be using rootmotion, which means that our programmers will have complete control over movement, rather than it being determined by Mixamo animations. This will allow them to concentrate on honing the precise controls they require, while we artists will have the freedom to use Maya to edit animations in a way that best suits our game.

We intend to implement animations in Unreal using blendspace. We haven't yet decided if we want to opt for a 1-Dimensional walking animation blendspace or one for each direction, as we're still prototyping movement controls for the project.

Multiple controllers in Unreal Engine?

Before starting with Unreal Engine I first made a test project to see how easy it is to set up multiple controller support in unreal engine. After some debugging, I have discovered that unreal engine 5.1 has some bugs with the new input system, but as long as we use the old input system we should be fine.

Shaders in Unreal Engine

When we decided what the art style of Super Galaxy Rugby would be, we ended up with a style that is heavily inspired by comics and graphical illustrations. And to visualize this, we had to research what kind of shaders would fit best. For this, some toon shader graphs had to be created. For now, after prototyping for a little bit, we ended up with a simple gradient, outline, and cell shading. Most of this is done with post-processing material. We are also testing out if we could replicate pen-line details with a shader or do we texture this by hand. For now, it seems like we have some manual texturing to do.

We're thrilled to be able to share our progress with you through this devlog, and we can't wait to show you more of what we've been working on. Stay tuned for more updates, and thanks for joining us on this journey!

- Akio, Jef, Jerke, Arne and Martijn