During the past week we have been exploring both Unreal and Unity to see which one will fits our game better, while prototyping game mechanics and finishing up the Art Bible.  We decided to go with Unity as the programmers found it easier to work with. 

ART DEV LOG:

During this week we have been working more on the art bible and developing what we want the game to look like, and discussing technical capabilities and limitations to see what is realistic and what isn’t.

- How will we make the sand look believable?

In the previous week, we prototyped using a vertex animation texture for the sand, but we decided that this is not optimal and decided to instead just use RFX to achieve this. We are planning to use both meshes and a sprite-sheet with dust to achieve the look we are looking for.

For the Dust, sand, Ripples & Bubbles we will be making them using sprites which will then be added as particles within Unity. As for the water splashes resulting from the tide crashing on the beach, we will try using sprites and a mesh to test if we can recreate the water splash animation on the beach, otherwise we will try to remake it with only sprites.

For the particles, we have found a few ways to recreate these effects within Unity. By using codes, we integrate the particles within the game, we can control the start and end of each particle. For example, the moving trail would be made to follow the character and that it would grow in size when the player changes direction.

- How do we want the UI to look?

We decided that for the UI, since our game is very colorful and stylized, our UI will also be made in the same manner and thus will integrate the look of the game within it as well. For example, we will have 2D, simplified, stylized Palm trees around the main menu and pause screen, which will have highlights and shadows. The menu background will have wood texture with thick sharp outlines. We will use the “Janda Manatee Bubble” font, since it seems to fit our style. For the colors we will go for green, yellow and orange shades with a hint of blue within the shadow of the menu.

- How will we make the water look realistic?

Since we decided to use Unity, we have been researching how to create shaders and what is possible graphics-wise. Because we are going to have a lot of foliage in the game, we wanted to achieve a subsurface-scattering look to have a more atmospheric and livelier scene – because unity does not have an inbuilt subsurface profile for their shaders, we are going to make our own – simplified – shader for it using vector math.

Thankfully, there were a lot of tutorials online on making water shaders in Unity. While making Gersner waves and foam at the edges is totally possible using the shader graph, we are still not sure how to make the water interact with our characters without coding – we will investigate this more later.

- How will the game look?

We decided to go for a ‘Sea of Thieves’ style, with a soft blue atmospheric fog and subtle bloom. We ran into problems while deciding how detailed our castles should be, as we wanted them to look complex but didn’t want it to compromise readability. We decided to have some smaller details like flags and wooden accents, but not individual bricks in the texture. While a crab could never build such a thing, we like to believe in a little bit of magic to help them along.

A mockup crab has been run through the entire texturing pipeline to work out some kinks and a rather efficient method has been developed. Using Substance Painter it is very quick to put a base coat over the model, including lighting gradients and bounce light, over which more unique details can quickly be added.

In the coming week we will be starting in our first sprint, we plan to finalize our designs for everything next week, we already have some concepts for the castles, crabs, and the bird – and we will start modelling the crab, the bird and the castles.

PROGRAMMING DEV LOG:

During this week we have started prototyping many of the gameplay mechanics, so far, we finished prototyping the water interacting with the terrain, the crab’s interacting with the sand, molds are almost finished working, the pearl is working. 

• How will we morph the ground when the crabs shovel the sand?

We decided to go with Unity as our game engine because Unreal does not support real-time terrain morphing. We decided to go with a procedural mesh where each vertex acts as an interact-able tile, and it goes up and down as the crab interacts with it. With the combination of RFX and further tweaking, we are positive that the sand will look believable.

For the water we are currently using spheres that check if it has hit sand that is taller than it for each tile. In the future we will replace this with planes for more optimization, and the water shader can make the water look more believable. For now, the water behaves properly and the tides can go further up the beach. However, the water is not very performance friendly right now, in the future we plan to use vertex colors for the wave visuals and place down larger planes under the sand mesh to create the illusion of filled water - and let the shader to the heavy lifting.

• What kind of problems did we run into?

We had some issues with changing the materials of the objects in real-time, Unity did not like to change the alpha of materials in real-time, but with a few more hours it should be working correctly. 

Another issue was simulating physics on the mesh. Because we wanted to simulate the castle being dropped, gravity and collision, we made it a rigid body. However, this does not work as we wanted - we suspect it is because of the uneven sand. We will look into more collision options for the sand and how it interacts with the castle. 

Being our first time working in a proper game, we ran into many stupid mistakes while doing inheritance on the interact-able objects. However, by being in a team, we were able to consult with each other about our bugs and fix them. It has been great to be able to depend on each other and know that there is always someone that can help you out.