Welcome to week 2 of our devlog for Crowned Control!

We have made quite some progress since our last devlog and would like to share some of it with you.

Art

Our artists started work on the Art bible. This is what will be guiding our art style throughout the rest of the project so this is a very important document to have properly finished at this stage of the project. These are some of our current design choices.

Moodboard

Colour

Our game environment and assets will be using flat colours with gradients and minimal details to prevent making the level too chaotic. The closer the object to centre of the level, the more saturated it will be. To add depth there will be atmospheric perspective, as well as height fog to add depth. As for the characters' colour pallet: The accent colours will be the most saturated thing on the whole level. The vignette of the level will be the darkest and least saturated. Players will be in different colours to avoid confusion.

Character proportion

The proportion of the character will be cartoony and stylized, inspired by Hollow Knight and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The character will be on the shorter side, compared to the environment and assets. The size of the head will be quite large in comparison to the rest of the body, since the top-down view will only showcase mostly the top side of everything. Environment and assets: The size of our environment will be similar to Brawl Stars with the interactable items and traps being bigger in size to emphasize their importance. The size of the level can be bigger than the play area to add depth.

Shapes

For the shapes, we decided to keep the main characters fairly rounded in shape with sharp features, since they’re knights. This will contrast the environment castle interior, which will be quite blocky in its shapes. The shapes will take in mind that we’re going to use gradient swatches on a texture sheet to be more resourceful. We’ll try to avoid hard edges but still keep them somewhat low detailed to avoid chaos in our environment. The traps and weapons will have sharp and pointed shapes to indicate they can hurt the player. All of the assets, will have their most important details on the upper half of the model to take into account the top-down view of our game.

Lighting

There will be a main light source providing the focus on the centre of our level. Our goal is to get soft lighting with quite harsh shadows. The atmosphere will be moody in feeling, achieved by a decrease in colour value and saturation at the edges of our level. All of the light sources will be warm in temperature, contrasting the cool temperature edges of the map.

Shaders

Basic Shaders tests have been prototyped in Unity 2022.2.9. as well. The general core of the shader functions just as in Unreal Engine. The following comparison of two images show the current state of this shader. The image on the left is without toon shader and the one on the right is with the toon shader applied.

There are still some issues that need to be resolved. For example, the outlines don’t seem to appear in screen spaces that contain contact areas. You can see this at the bottom of the feet of the characters in the image below.

 Another problem that still needs to be resolved is the appearance of a very large outline at the upper edge of the screen. This is probably related to the issue we had in Unreal Engine as well: really thick outlines started to cover the walls and floors when looked upon with a view vector nearing the vector parallel to the observed plane. See the video below for clarification.

 This last issue can probably be solved with stencils or by utilizing a fixed angle and distance for the camera. The latter solution can be achieved by trial and error through tweaking the shader settings.

What's next?

• Explore texture pipeline.
• Explore level layouts and trap interactions.
• Finish the art bible
• FX design choices

Programming

For the code this week, we worked out some of our mechanics in the prototype a bit more and made a first working prototype to try out.

We implemented multiplayer gameplay as well as controller input. And there is now also a counter for the time in possession of the crown.

Multiplayer gameplay with 2 players:

Multiplayer gameplay with 4 players:

Mechanics

Controller scheme:

A basic attack is engaged with the X button. You can :

• Push/Click the button to use the light attack
• Hold the button and releasing it to use a charged attack The direction of the attack is shown with a little arrow next to the character

The charged attack is a dash.
You have to charge during X frames. Progress of the charge is indicated by the arrow being filled up.

• It instantly stuns players that get hit. 
•  It steals the crown directly without having to grab it on the ground and the crown doesn't fall on the ground.

The Knight is the base character in the game when you don't wear the crown. It can :

• Attack with basic attacks
• Use objects
• Toggle traps

The crowned Knight has ghost powers and is the only Player that has HP. The number of max HP is 3.

If the number of HP is equal or lower than 0, the ghost loses its crown and the player is stunned, returning to its Knight state and losing its ghost powers.

Ghost powers might include:

• Passing through walls
• Creating clones
• Creating a slime puddle
• A ghost cry

After we finish up our Game Design, it's time to start on the Production phase, which we are very excited for.

See you next week!