Introduction

Hello and welcome to the FoodFight Devlog! This page was created to document our game's development progress for the course Game Projects at DAE Howest.

The FoodFight team comprises of 5 DAE students: Axel and Remi from Game Development, and Jorrit, Kenneth, and Rick from Game Graphics Production. We aim to create a fun, food-themed fighting game in the following weeks, and we hope you'll keep up with our weekly Devlogs. (:

In FoodFight, you play as a chef that gathers ingredients to make dishes. Deal damage to other chefs with your tasty creations: the last chef standing wins! Ingredients will be spawned throughout the level, and an overhead menu will display the possible dish combinations. Each dish has a different attack ability. If the idea of making Burger Bombs or Taco Traps interest you, then continue reading to find out how we'll go about developing FoodFight. 

To start off this development update, we will bring you through our initial prototype and art bible creation. In order to keep our Devlogs organized, we'll be splitting them into 2 main sections; Art and Coding.

Art

The art style of the game will be very stylised. The idea is that it looks playful and that you want to play the game again and again. The props in the game are going to be simple but because of their clear shapes and big details, they will be recognizable to everyone. We would go for a combination between handpainted and stylised pbr renders. Especially the colors of the food items will stand out so that the player can easily collect them and throw them on his opponents. That is why we have decided not to saturate the background so that it certainly does not take away the attention. Also, the background will consist of straight and angular lines while the foreground, the food items and the chracters will consist of rounder shapes.

Coding

Unreal or Unity?

Particle systems

during the researching phase of this project we wanted to know how user friendly the particle system in Unity is and how it differs from the particle system in Unreal engine. To research this, one of the artists of the team tried to recreate a particle system made in Unreal in Unity.
At first glance the particle system of Unity called shuriken seems to have a lot of options for particle creation, all the available operations for particles seem to already be present in the shuriken menu. The only challenge is finding out where all the variables are hidden and how you can adjust them. Because of the giant list of properties you can adjust from the get-go navigating through shuriken can be a bit tricky.
In contrast to Shuriken, the user interface of  Unreal's particle system: Niagara, seems to be more organized but each particle also misses al lot of properties from the get go which you wel have to add on your own. It does come with a initialize particle function, which generates all starting parameters for the particle, but you can remove this  and make your own. This has the advantage that your particle emitter won't have unnecessary parameters you will not be using.

In regards to combining particle effects there is also a difference. In Unreal you will have to create a particle system to hold all your particle emitters in order to display it in the level. This particle system can of course hold multiple particle emitters, without a particle system you cant place the [article effects in the level. The downside of Niagara is that you have to know what kind of modules you need to look for to make a good particle system, but you can always look this up.  

In Unity you can place a particle effect in the level, but to create a system with shuriken that can hold multiple particles you would have to make a specific prefab for holding all these particle emitters. The amount of prefabs might ramp up with multiple systems so to speak, but with proper naming conventions this isn't a big deal.

The big pro for Niagara right now seems to be its modularity, which allows you to freely add and remove properties from the particle emitters 
allowing you to create more customizable particle emitters. The UI of Niagara also is a lot clearer than that of Shuriken. 
Unity has a lot of build in options for particle creation but the  UI feels unclear and cluttered. 

Meet the alternative: The Visual Effects Graph of unity for URP and HDRP. A node based particle editor that is easy to use for those who have experience with Niagara. It is more visual and allows for a lot of options for particle system costumization. 

Above we see a particle node for a smoke poof, a simple particle effect to make. this particle only uses the nodes of the main system. But the visual effects graph also allows you to add extra math nodes and input nodes to further customize the particle you are creating.

Shaders and materials
One of the other questions we asked ourselves was  how we could create and edit materials in Unity. Some of the artists already had some experience with material creation in Unreal via the node -based system of Unreal, but we still needed to know how this would work in Unity.

It turns out that Unity does not have a material editor by default, but it does have one. Technically it is not a material editor but a shader editor. Unity seems to only use materials as containers for shaders, and the shader is the part of the material that is responsible for its behavior. One of the first advantages of the shader editor in Unity is that it comes with some build in shader functions that are quite useful that are missing form Unreal or and have to make yourself. One such example is the fresnel shader which comes build into the shader editor in Unity. In Unreal you have to calculate the fresnel effect with math nodes.

Unity has a lot of the same blending operations to blend different nodes with each other, the standard operations are all there: divide multiply, subtract and add. These can be used to blend nodes to create different effects, same as in Unreal. The thing that seems to be missing from Unity however is the option to easily create parameters from the existing nodes. Something that is very useful in Unreal for creating different instances of a material with different values for each parameter. 

Controller support

While prototyping in Unreal, we noticed that there was no built-in support for playstation controllers. This got us looking into Unity's native controller support. It turns out they have out-of-the-box support for xbox, playstation, and switch pro controllers. Since controller input is our main input device, it is one of the reasons we might choose Unity over Unreal. 

Thanks for reading the Devlog, and we hope to see you next week!

~ FoodFight Team (: