Welcome to our Devlog for our upcoming game!

Let us introduce our snowball (WIP name) game. The game is simple. You play as kid, that is playing by himself in a park. Fighting your imaginary enemies with your snowball rolling and throwing skills. Try to survive as long as you can and be careful, when the snowstorm hits, you’re going to need all the snow you see around you.

It’s basically top-down (with certain angle) endless survival game.

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I think it is also important to introduce ourselves so here we are:

Artists:

Daniil Shashenkov – Mostly interested in environments as well as in game design in general. Stylized design and creatin is not unknow to him. In this project focusing on full character creation.

Favourite game: Dishonored

Robin Vandenberghe – His main domain and most favourite thing to do is audio for games. Also, RFX and environments are something he enjoys. In this project focusing on audio alongside with helping in creating environments.

Favourite game: Not a big gamer but Paradox strategy games are his go to games.

Stijn Hernalsteen – Modelling, texturing props and assets creation is where he thrives at. Creating RFX in UE4 Niagara is also part of the game creation he enjoys alongside with some environment. In this project focusing on RFX, environments and proceduralism.

Favourite games: Red Dead Redemption 2, Subnautica, Hollow Knight

Filip Hajek – Generalist, likes to create worlds that players can walk through. From creating assets, props, characters to environments, he enjoys doing It all. His focus on this project is mainly on environment and helping where it is needed.

Favourite game: Does not play games anymore but used to play Dota 2.

Programmers:

Sam Wilkinson – Problems? He likes them, but most importantly he gets rid of them. Creating something cool is and always has been his focus.

Favourite games: Apex Legends and Baldur’s Gate 3

Rufat Aliyev – Coding and making mechanics is something he excel at. Ask him to do anything and in a blink of an eye you got working prototype in your hands.

Favourite game: Mostly FPS, RPG and RTS type of games.

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Now that you know something about us let’s look at what we did last week.

• We tried to tackle the most important question we asked ourselves for some time, what engine are we going to use?

It’s not that simple as it might seem. All artists are familiar with UE4, the shader graph and blueprints are really artists friendly, on the other hand it’s not that programmer friendly, especially if you’ve never worked with this engine.

After some research and some small prototyping in both engines we decided to go with unity. As you could see there are 4 artists and just 2 programmers. So we want to take as much work load as we can from programmers shoulders and this is one of the ways we decided to do so.

• Now finally some fun stuff. Movement of the character, how?

Few ideas arose for movement, is the player going to move on a grid or do we allow free movement in any direction? This relates to how we want to tackle the snowball rolling/piling up, so let’s tackle that first.

Main mechanic: Snowball Rolling:

• Can the player grab the ball and just move it like this?

• Or can we move the ball as it was physical object like this?

We decided to go with the physical option cause it looks more natural and player can even stop rolling the ball and go and roll another one.

• With this decided, we can think about the movement itself. Can we make physical ball rolling with grid-based movement? Maybe, but it would be probably more annoying than anything else, so right now we are going with the free movement, but who knows it might change in the future, it’s still prototyping and research phase of the game development so we will see.

• We also discussed some art related things, like what type of graphics we want to go with, and we all decided to go with graphics style like Dota 2, here are some screenshots for those who have no idea what Dota 2 is and how it looks like:

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Upcoming week:

Regarding the upcoming week, there are plenty of things we need to do, one of the main things is to polish some of the mechanics that are not that well thought through, see what works and what does not. That applies to the graphics side of the game as well. We are going to do some basic blockouts for the game and see how the proportions of the assets should be, try to do maybe one asset and see how the pipeline and workflow works, and based on that do some changes to prepare for production.

But that should be it for now. Hope we can see you next week when our next devblog appears on this page.

Have a nice week,

bye!