Welcome to the first blog post of this game.

This project is made by students at the Belgian school Howest of the Bachelor course DAE (Digital Arts & Entertainment).

The game will be an arcade game with theme space. In the game, the player has to break rubble and collect it in order to pay of the debt within a certain time frame. The player with the shortest time will get in the leaderboard. There will also be asteroids that damage the player.

The team behind this game will be:

• Casier Robbe - our programmer
• Begas Wouter - one of the artists
• Couvreur Niels - another artist
• Dekeyser Alex - yet another artist
• Stoffelen Thijs - the last artist

This week we had to do research for our game to know what needed to be known to get a clearer vision of what we will use and do.

The first question was: Which engine will be used?

At first, it seemed as a big question, but our artist have little knowledge on Unity, so the decision was made to use Unreal Engine V4.26.1. Also, due to the fact that we came from 2 programmers. The second programmer quit which l allowed us to use the blueprints more to get things done quicker for our only programmer.

The second question was: How do we implement a space effect with thrusters?

We all knew how you can make a simple character movement, but making sure the character still moves a bit after a movement was something new to the team. Our programmer had to think to find a good way to implement this, because some things in Unreal Engine just don't make sense. He wanted to disable gravity together with a low braking force. This was not a problem when using a pawn, but this didn't have the braking effect when you went in the opposite direction and instead stopped the player. The character movement component does have this, but the character actor had gravity.

The third question was: Which mechanic will we use to collect the scraps?

From the four ideas, we tested the 2 most promising: a grab arm and a magnetic field?

First we tested the grab arm, which gave us some trouble with the object circling around the ship. But due to the time based game. This would make things slower which would bring the player out of the fast pace this game is about. Something our second mechanic does much better. The magnetic field, this mechanic can let the player quickly pick up multiple items at once. And made the effect that happened in the first mechanic look realistic.

The last question: Camera angle and distance?

We had already decided to make it a top-down game, but because the game is 3D and will not play as the field is the size of your screen, we had to look for a good angle and distance that would be good to show the world. With it, we also got the idea to let the camera move a little in the direction the player went.

What we will do next week?

By the end of next week we should have a prototype of the game that shows us the main features.

See you next week!