Introduction

Welcome to the first “Die or Not” devlog. "Die or Not" is a game created for the Game Projects course at DAE Howest.

Time to introduce our wonderful team. We are a group consisting of 3 artists (Piotr, Peter and Simone) and 2 programmers (Ilkka and Glenn). All of us are looking forward to creating an enjoyable game for you to play once it's done and have fun whilst developing it of course.

Stick around to see how our PvP party arena shooter develops. We will be posting weekly updates containing our future plans, changes and important decisions we made during the development of “Die or Not”.

Gameplay

“Die or Not” is a game about bouncing bullets from things, mostly the level itself but we'll come back to this later. Each match starts with a countdown during which all the players decide which direction they want to shoot their one and only bullet. The rest of the game is based around dodging the bullets but more importantly bouncing your bullet into the opponents. The core idea behind the gameplay is the player's ability to redirect the bullet when it bounces into a new direction.

Art

The art style for our game is still developing although we do have a main vision of how we want our game to present itself.

The focus should be on making everything clear and easy to follow as the gameplay can go from full control to total chaos in the blink of an eye. To make that happen we decided against using complicated materials and realistic looking levels. The game should have clear division between the gameplay elements and the environment. We will try to enforce that division by creating contrast in saturation and value of colours used for players and their bullets in opposition to background and platforms/walls.

As main example of this kind of art style we refer to "Stick Fight: The Game" although our game will be done in 3D the colour usage in this game is what we want to achieve in ours. 

A simple and clear art style gives us a lot of room to add special effects on hits, bounces, parries and other elements of gameplay that would make the game more satisfying to play.

Design

We decided to make some core design decisions one of them being making the game in sideview instead of top-down. This allows for more dynamic gameplay as the gravity force applied to the players makes them more vulnerable and thus making them more willing to run around and jump to avoid being eliminated.

Another important decision we made was the introduction of certain gameplay mechanics like parrying and perfect bouncing. Both of those mechanics are placed in the game with the intent of making it more satisfying to play as they give the player opportunity to gain advantage with precise inputs. The parry is a defensive mechanic that uses a one-time use resource, which allows the player to bounce the bullet that would otherwise kill them. On the other side the perfect bounce is an offensive mechanic which boosts the speed of the bullet if the player timed their input in the moment when the bullet bounces.

Like we mentioned earlier we also talked about how the round starts and decided that it would be best to have the players pick which direction they want their bullets to go during a countdown. If a player does get a bullet back, that player will have slower movement speed and will not be able to use the parry until they shoot their bullet.

We also made other gameplay decisions which we will just list up:

1. If bullets run into each other they bounce from one another.
2. Players can NOT have more than one bullet as it leads to way too chaotic gameplay and removes any skill from the equation.
   
3. We want to add some environmental challenges like difficulties in movement but no environmental bullets for now for the same reason as in point 2.
4. Players can tell bullets apart by the bullet colour and colour of the trail the bullets leave behind, which is the same as the colour of the player who shot the bullet.
5. Players can only decide when to shoot if their initial bullet from the start of the round is destroyed. Players who must still shoot their bullet will have slower movement speed and will not be able to use their parry as mentioned earlier.
6. Parry can be replenished after the use at random places but also one scripted spawn somewhere. The scripted spawn will have longer cooldown.
7. We do NOT want any indication of the bullet path. We do think that there should be a small indicator of the bounce direction in the place where the bullet will hit. The indicator is proximity based and is only visible when the bullet gets closer to the bounce point.
8. If the round goes for too long arena starts to collapse.
9. Bullets will speed up the longer they remain in the arena.
10. If the player fails a perfect bounce, there is a cooldown before they can attempt it again.

Engine

We decided to use Unreal Engine 5.1 to make our game as it provides excellent tools in form of blueprints for non-programmers in our team to tweak and fine tune gameplay elements. It's also beneficial for our programmers as they already know C++ and won't spend time on learning new programming languages.