More Prototyping

Hi there future bullet bouncers!

This week was another busy week full of more prototyping and decision making. Our programmers tried out some new things and our artists did some serious work on defining the art style for our game.

Gameplay prototypes

Let's talk about the gameplay first.

Environmental challenges

After the first week of research prototyping we concluded that the environment should have some environmental challenges such as spikes or pitfalls. We thought dynamic elements like bullets would make the game too chaotic and less fun so we were originally going to avoid dynamic dangers, but that might have changed during this week.

"Prototypes to the rescue!"

Here you can find some of our findings about environmental challenges:

• Random bullets flying through the level work better if there are less players in the field.
• Static challenges add a nice touch to the importance of movement and being aware of your surroundings. But the amount of challenges should be limited to make sure the arena isn't just one big minefield.
• Static challenges might be better to be concentrated on the ground instead of the platforms.

We do still need to do some further testing around this topic, but we definitely like the idea.

Bullet predictions

For this we decided that the bullets should have some indicators letting the players now where in the level the bullet would bounce and in which direction it will be redirected.

We also tested the impact of showing the full trajectory of a bullet with a very thin line for the next X amount of bounces for example. Although the results looked pretty cool and it does feel nice to be dodging the lines to make sure you don't get hit, it does add a lot to the screen and again even more stuff for the players to keep track of.

Round starts

"3, 2, 1... FIGHT" Or something like that at least. So, how should the start of a round in our game look and feel? That's what we were asking ourselves now.

We came up with the idea of having a countdown at the start of each round during which the players are unable to move. They can only aim in the direction they want to shoot their bullet. And when the countdown is over all players automatically fire their bullet in the direction they are currently aiming. This also resolved the issue we were having with players being able to simply walk up to another player and shoot their bullet guaranteeing a direct hit and basically impossible to dodge projectile for that other player.

The countdown also serves a second purpose because it also informs the players that the next round is about to start.

Art decisions/prototypes

Ok, enough about gameplay for this week. Let's catch you up with our latest art related decisions and discoveries. Our artists chose a sci-fi theme for the game after taking inspiration from many well known games, the style being stylized with realistic lighting fitting well with the chill and fast paced game we are making. Many aspects of the art style are well defined already, but next week we might have much more to show you. In the meantime, enjoy these prototypes the artists made.

Notice the soft backgrounds and the well-defined shapes of the foreground in the image. We don't want the players to mistake background for a playable area.

The character shapes are also defined already, we are going with more round shapes for the player characters as opposed to the sharp angles and features of the environment.

We also made some prototypes for the platform shapes, RFX and shaders.

The platforms with flat camera facing surface and chamfered edges seemed to work the best. We also decided to fill concave spaces with tilted faces.

For the shaders we opted against cell shaded look as it seemed to work against our realistic lighting vision. It also hidered the redability of the scene.

The RFX were something we decided to keep simple because our scene would get cluttered with effects. 

So we want to do this:

And avoid that:

That's it for this week! We hope to see you next week where we can share some more things.