Hello visitor, this week the FoodFight team has been working on finalizing the Technical Document, Art Bible and game prototype.  

Art

The artists are finally complete with the Art Bible and have been working on adding art assets to the prototype. Everything went good and we were happy with the results.

Props

We made a few test food props and tested the gradient map texture workflow for our hamburger prop and it looked very nice. In the future we will give it more details like sesame seeds on the bread and then the contrast of a simple texture and a detailed prop will come out really well.  Through the food prototypes, we figured that if we want to use gradient maps, we need the gradients to have more contrast to the values. This is due to the food prototype models not having a very strong gradient on them. This issue will definitely help us in the future texturing sheets that we will make for the environment and props. 

We also experimented with making shaders in Unity for the props and characters. We tried making an outline shader, however, it's proving very difficult to work. We tried 5 different tutorials and none of them gave a useable result. We will be consulting a teacher to try and resolve this issue as none of our group members are familiar with creating shaders in unity. We did however, manage to create a halftone shader that we will be applying to the props and environment to create more visual interest to the gradient mapped textures. The halftone shader is influenced by the angle of the game's directional light so we will need to ensure that the angle that it's pointing at makes the shader visible.

The halftone shader also has editable parameters such as custom pattern inputs, pattern density, pattern color and pattern threshold. We will be refining this shader more throughout the production process.

The artists have come up with interesting food combinations such as the pasta lasso, the pizza frisbee and the cake bomb. Also with each combination a different effect will happen as for example with the cake here the candle will burn out and then the whole cake will explode. This will make the game so much more interesting. You will also be able to play the game a lot more tactically.

The level itself will take place on the tropical beaches of Hawaii. We want to give the players a pleasant and carefree time like on a vacation but with the necessary action so that you will certainly not be bored. The level will be split into 2: an interior and an exterior. The exterior will feature docks, beach seats, torches, and of course the sea. While the interior, will consist of a kitchen with burning fires that the players will have to watch out for, but also a restaurant and a storage room.

UI Layout 

For the UI, we had the brilliant idea to make the menus on top of the screen change on the every so often and so show new food combinations to the player. When that happens, new ingredients will also spawn in the level that you can  use to make the combos from the menu.

We made a few level layouts in Unreal and in Unity. The levels are simple but we made them interesting by adding  height differences and a lot of walls to hide for the food rain  of the other players.  As artists we have struggled a lot with learning how  the engine Unity works because we never used it but slowly we get some results and we are happy with them. One of our artists has tried to make an outline shader but their are a few things that don't work so we're thinking about removing that feature and replacing it with a colored particle that floats above you, indicating where you are. The particle would leave a trail of mini particles when you move.

Coding

Moving to Unity

This week we moved to unity because of its superior controller support. It worked perfectly and will be one of the main reasons we permanently move to the engine for Foodfight.

Playtesting from home

Because we are making a couch co-op game, a big limitation is not being able to playtest alone. We need to physically be in the same room to properly test our game. However, we wanted to playtest while we weren't. This got us looking into possible networking solutions, but that seemed like a stretch. In the end we found a wonderful program called Parsec.

Parsec is a program that forwards your controller input to another computer, and shows you their display. It is used by many to play local co-op games online, and is the perfect solution to our problem. If you want to try the program yourselves, you can download it here. There are public rooms you can join, and start playing local co-op games with random people.

Building the prototype

We were experiencing a lot of issues around controller support with Unreal Engine, so this week we decides to try out Unity. Controller support went very smoothly, and most features worked out of the box. We already had a character in our project which had animations for moving forward. In our game our characters have the ability to run in any direction they want whilst facing in a single direction.  We added a animation blend for backwards and sideways movement. We ported over the food spawners and pickups to our unity project and then went on to add combos. 

Currently a combo item just deals extra damage, but in the future, we plan on having special bonus effects . Afterwards we added A HUD which has a menu that shows combos and a small GUI for each player that is in the game which shows their current health and which items are in their inventory.

Prototype

For the prototype it was hard work to bring everything , the level, the coding together, the uncertainty that the game would be boring  but we are happy to announce that the game is fun to play. Our team enjoyed it a lot and we can't wait to start the production phase. This will be for certain a game worth waiting for.

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

~ FoodFight Team (: