Welcome to week 3 of our devlog for Crowned Control!

We have officially finalized all of our design choices this week. This means we have a finished tech Doc, Sound Doc, Art Bible and Game Design Model. We would love to share with you our progress on some of these developments

Art

RFX

We decided on what type of RFX we would need to do and we are going for simple 3D based particles, but still quite cartoony in appearance. This will highlight a certain action or increase the readability of our level. Think of torches, sword attack swipes, movement trails, player highlights and shining particles on valuable items.

The RFX for the sword slash trail utilized the Particle System instead of the Trail option in Effects. Some sources insisted that the use of the latter was less performance friendly, even for generating trails.  

The use of mesh particles was tested and even utilized to generate the illusion of a flame and smoke. Thanks to the aid of some online sources, it was made clear that some variants of meshes were better suited for RFX. The example being the use of icosahedron instead of the typical spheres offered by default by the modelling software. This improves the real-time performance.

  

The ghostification shader’s core was also set up.  The current state of this ghostification effect doesn’t contain any particle effects yet. It only performs some vertex displacements and opacity tweaks to generate the floating ghost effect. The next step would be the addition of some actual RFX to get a really spooky result. There seem to be some limitations to this shader effect though:  it doesn’t work as well on planar surfaces (compared to the more curved surfaces). Another important remark in context of using this shader is the necessity to maintain readability at greater distances while still having this transparent effect. This equilibrium should be achieved with some trail and error.

Texturing

For our textures, we are going to use a flat texture with a gradient for less important elements and hand-painted texture for items of importance. We will have a lot of stone, metal and wood in our scene. These textures could be made procedurally with Substance Designer. We will keep the details at a minimum, mostly highlighting the type of material and preventing repetition.

Level Layout

We also went and updated our prototype environment. We decided on making our level more square-shaped and rotated 45 degrees so that it now has a diagonal layout. We have added walls and a better layout where traps and pickups will be located. With this, we could define our camera angle better and see what play area size works best.

Items and Traps

We finally made a list of pickups, powers and traps our game will have! All items are themed around castle dungeons. Currently, this is what we picked for the items:

• A bomb you can throw at others
• Eat a pepper to gain speed for a limited time

These will be our powers for the knight that possesses the crown:

• They will gain more speed
• Have the ability to interact with portals on the walls to pass through them
• Obtain the ability to cry like a banshee and knock your opponents back

These are the traps present in our level:

• Floor spikes activated when stepping on them
• Fire traps that spew fire at a fixed frequency and duration

What's next?

• We have to start making concept art
• Start modelling our assets
• Create a simple asset in our style

Programming

We have officially chosen to further develop our game in Unity. This was a fairly straightforward choice for the programmers because it was much easier to implement our mechanics in Unreal. Our shader artist was also brilliantly able to recreate his cell shader with outline in Unity.

At that time though, the programmers had already prototyped the core mechanics in Unity so the choice for the preferred game engine was an easy one in the end, albeit not ideal for the artists because of them having more experience in Unreal. But the artists were still very excited to learn the workflow of Unity especially since their impact on the work in the engine is quite small.

Below is some example gameplay implementing our current mechanics.

Sound Design

For this week we focused on creating a general feel of the game, this incudes sound.

Out game will be locedted in a underground dungeon armed with deadly traps, for this we started with some suspencesfull beattle music to highlight the importance of the fight at hand.  We start off the fight with a war horn a anchient custom for Mideaval times, an offiial battle has undergone and be ready to fight for your place as the next king.

Every player will have the option to open chests with magic items in them to aid in battle. For this i added a simple chest open sound and a megical highlight when using said item. Ofcouse the traps are a big deal in the upcomming battle. Take your enemies of guard by placing traps on the arena or use already place defences. A gate that can lock in other placers. arrow traps ready to unload, spikes to fille u in seconds.

Last but not least the crows in a special magic item left by the old guard, its has the property to enhance the individual wielding it. For this the crown will be "active" waiting for it's next wielder by attracting others to it. This is made possible by the bell chime on the crown and the teleport when a player loses said crown. When players are out of lifes they get stunned  attributed by a mashup of hit and magic.

Mechanics

When it comes to game mechanics, we prototyped some of our final mechanics. These being items, passive traps and the charged attack.

First we implemented the charged attacks, which lets your attack instantly steal the crown from the ghostly knight. The hardest part about this was trying to get a sense of player feedback in. We ended up visualizing this as your attack hitbox changing color, however this will eventually become your sword.

Next up, passive traps. These are just a variation of the traps that were already present in the level, but instead of activating them, they get trigger when someone walks over them. This did introduce a rather annoying feature where it gets hard to obtain the crown after someone dies to it, as you instantly die to the trap once you take it.

Lastly, we needed some items. We made two items to showcase how the final items will work as well. Currently there are two in the game, a pepper that speeds you up, and an oil spill that slows down players that get into contact with it.

Of course, we needed a way of obtaining these items as well. That's why we made a small randomized crate, when coming into contact with it, you obtain one of the items inside.

With these parts prototyped, we have a working game loop that's playable, you can download it from our main page!

Up next is the first Production phase. We're excited to really get this game going, and we can't wait to show what else we have in store the coming weeks.

See you next week!