Hello! We are 5 students from Howest working on a game for the course: “Game projects” at DAE.

Our group is made up of 2 artists, Milena and Lorena, 2 coders, Benjamin and Briek, and 1 Sound designer, Zain. We are currently on a journey to create an endless 2 player co-op roguelike game about 2 siblings with an everlasting soul bond. There will be a Devlog update on a weekly basis, highlighting our design decisions and thought processes.

In our game, you wake up as 2 siblings in a mysterious world. In this world, they must learn to work together to survive as long as possible. This philosophy is expressed using a soul bond tether mechanic. The tether is a light beam between the siblings that connects them. It is in essence, part of their life force. Enemies will spawn endlessly in waves. Enemy attacks damage and knock back the siblings. Try to stay together, as being too far from each other breaks the link and starts damaging you both! Clear waves to get stacking buffs, allowing for multiple builds. Using an ultimate attack gives your partner your buffs and vice versa, so think carefully about how both of you build!

For this first Devlog iteration, we will be going through the first round of prototyping and researching that was done to shine a light on each of our processes within different domains. This Devlog will be structured and split up into 3 different domains; art, programming and sound, to give each domain a chance to explain their work in their own way.

Art

We have an idea and gameplay, but how will the game feel and how will it look? With those questions we started research for different moods and themes. At first we had the idea of making a child and familiar run around a world with different creatures that try to attack the players. It has been changed after looking at several references and moods, and after we switched the animal familiar with a sibling for our child character.

Our two main characters are based on the sun and the moon respectively, and together they have to fight their way through the darkness of the dungeon, while their connection literally and metaphorically lights their way. The next idea was creating the setting in a dream. However, we quickly changed that to create a dark and moody theme. The environment appeals darker with little to see where the enemies are coming from. It’s important for our child protagonists to look small and innocent against the dangers of the dungeon, so their current designs use bright colors and weapons almost as large as them. They seem well prepared for a fight with toy swords. Only you can help them navigate and persevere in a real fight against never ending hordes of dark spawns.

After we finally decided on a mood we moved on to focus on a style. Realism has never been a real option here though. Here again we researched for different ideas and looked for rather stylized references. Keeping it simple, yet interesting was the main thought. We will not see everything from the environment in one screen, nor will we have everything lightened up clearly. Therefore keeping it simple will be the best idea here.

Now that we have a picture in our mind it was time to create a couple shaders to try out. We have created different shaders to strengthen the style we are going for.

At first a Color Tint Shader was created. It tints the entire screen with a chosen color, whose strength can be adjusted. With this shader you can give the entire game a cold or a warm mood.

To increase the danger of the environment we added a Vignette Shader. Once the tether disconnects your vision gets darker.

Further we created a Tone Shader to make everything look less realistic and give the whole game an easier look.

Programming

After we narrowed down the core aspects for the game, we decided it was necessary to test both major game engines (Unreal and Unity). Therefore, we split up to prototype different aspects of the game separately in each engine to see which engine fits the best for our decided mechanics and applicability to our circumstances.

The primary aspect for the gameplay elements to prototype was a rough outline of movement, this movement is currently planned to be like a twin stick shooter, while also having a dash available on a short cooldown. This is the aspect that we managed to prototype this week. We will further iterate on this prototype along with building up the other prototypes too.

In the following weeks we are also planning to prototype:

• The core gameplay element of the tether as mentioned prior. In particular, we will need to test the disconnecting and reconnecting aspect, and also the negative repercussions for losing connection.
• Simple enemy interactions with the player, such as pushing the players away from each other and the damage values that may need to be important.
• Enemy spawning system. In specific, the way they may spawn in clusters and how many that will spawn needs to be tested and taken into account.

We will build upon the prototypes that we already have and make a prototype version of the game with most if not all of the core gameplay elements that we will iterate on through the development process.

Sound

Sound wise, This week has mostly been used for research purposes.

I started off by looking up a bunch of sonic references from other games. These references helped me get a better idea of the kind of sonic style we would go for. I first searched for games within similar genres, namely roguelikes. An Immediate candidate for a reference was Children of Morta. Children of Morta’s audio is very crisp and impactful. Its mix of mechanical and synthetic sounds work very well to give the player the information they need about its combat and interactions. After finding a bunch of references. I was locking in more and more onto a specific style of audio. Other references used for inspiration are the unreleased Crowsworn and the Dark Souls series.

The aspects within these references that are most interesting sonically, are the fact that all of these games have a very ‘foley’ style direction when it comes to sound. They all all have mechanical tones, with many recordings used for the base of most sounds. Layering techniques were used to add character to the sounds, making them more unique and satisfying. Since these games have combat in the forefront, care was taken to ensure that every attack felt satisfying. I also noticed that for many attacks, a lot of thought was put into how long a specific attack sound lasted. Many attacks were quite short, sometimes even shorter than the corresponding animation, adding to the force or oomph of an attack.

While I was looking for these references, we still had the idea that the characters would be made out of 2d sprites. This led to me focusing on 2d games as references. We eventually decided to go for a full 3d aesthetic for the entire game, leading to me doubting whether these references would still hold up. Thankfully, I believe that the sonic styles work well in both 2d and 3d contexts.

After looking around for references for a while, I moved onto some real fun stuff, creating a moodboard to reflect how the game would sound!

Starting out was tough, as I had little visual references to go by. I mostly based myself on moodboards our artists gave me and on the discussions that we had about our theme and mood.

The feeling I mainly wanted to convey was mystery. WIth this, I took a more musical approach to things. I started out by adding different sustained ambiences, layering different processed sounds on top of each other within different frequency ranges. These were then balanced on top of each other, and processed further to really nail down that misty and cloudy mysterious feeling. I then added in some recording of me whispering, added a lot of reverb and delay. This created a really cool accent to the ambience!

I then went on to create a bunch of demo assets showcasing some character and enemy sounds. In the end, I ended up creating some character footstep sounds, some character hit sounds and some sounds of the siblings slashing their swords around. I combined all of these into 1 scene and created a mini sound scape that showcases a little gameplay sequence.

You can listen to the result here.

After this, I mainly worked on writing out some technical details about the game’s audio and I answered some design questions.

Research Questions

Are we creating our game in 2D or 3D?

• At first both. The characters were 2D and the environment 3D. That has been changed and the characters will be modeled in 3D now, too. To make the game feel like a whole and keep the style the same it’s a better decision to create everything in 3D. Changing assets as well as placeholders is easier with 3D objects instead of 2D. Different scales will not be as noticed and are quick to do. 2d frame by frame animations require a lot of attention from the artists that could be better spent on polishing the overall look of the game, 3D animations can be found premade and can be reused over different characters with similar rigs.

What theme/mood are we going for?

• A child and familiar fight their way through the evil of the world, at first. After that an idea of a “dreamy” mood came up. Everything about the game was supposed to look and feel like a dream. At the end we decided for a dark environment mood with characters that appear light. A high contrast of dark/light is created. Further the characters symbolize the sun and moon, which creates a warm/cold contrast.

What type of gameplay experience are we looking for?

• We are looking for a fast paced and cooperative experience that pushes the players to make choices together. The decisions in the game highlight the fact that a single decision of one player can affect the other drastically. E.g.: If player one decides to go too far away from the other player it will lead to the tether breaking. It weakens both players and might lead to a game over. Choices have to be made together and agreed on, as this whole game concept is about playing together, not against each other.

What techniques did we use (and do we plan to use) to showcase our mood even more?

• To strengthen the mood we are going for we have created a few shaders to use. A Tone Shader was created to keep the look simple and change the look of the game with the given parameters. We have control over the shadows as well as the colors. Another shader we have created is the Tint Shader. It gives us the possibility to change the color, and therefore the mood, of the entire scene. A Vignette Shader has been added to the collection as well, making the scene feel smaller and darker. Fog was intended to add too, yet the Fog Shader doesn’t do as intended. Currently it feels similar to the Tint Shader that was created before. There are many more techniques that can be used and will be used. Adding light to the scene and placing them correctly will be something we will work on in the near future. Lights will be attached to the characters as well to make them stand out even more. It gives the player an easier time to find each other and re-connect the tether you have been disconnected from. It’s also giving the players the possibility to pay attention to how far they actually are and if they are able to split even more.