Welcome!

We’re five second year students of Digital Arts & Entertainment. Three Game Graphics Production students, focusing on the visuals of the game. And two Game Development students, focusing on the development/programming side of the game. This game project is our first major group project.

The team:

• Daniele (2nd year Game Graphics Production)
• Nick (2nd year Game Graphics Production)
• Joaquin (2nd year Game Graphics Production)
• Wouter (2nd year Game Development)
• Sander (2nd year Game Development)

The game:

In the game, you play as an astronaut. You find yourself on a deserted moon, spaceship battery empty, depleting oxygen, not a good spot to be in. With no way out, your only choice is to survive.  Surviving will not be easy, to get oxygen you’ll need to leave your ship and search for resources to fill up the battery. These resources come from off-planet asteroids. When an asteroid falls onto the surface, it leaves a crater behind, filled with resources. The environment on the moon is hostile. Huge dust storms will make movement and vision difficult. Acid rains will destroy your space suit. Meteor showers are also not a rarity on the planet.

To give the game a little twist, it will contain physics based movement and item grabbing as well as terrain destruction. These aspects are supposed to work together with the art style to give you (the player) a more fun based and lite experience.

The current state:

During our first heavy prototype phase we proved that all our crazy ideas  are feasible

• For the physics based movement we got inspiration from games like “Gang Beasts”, “Human: Fall Flap” and “Fall Guys”. This was easy to implement and also a lot of fun! It works using a dynamic ragdoll movement system in Unity. It’s not finished yet, but it looks very promising.
• Destructible terrain is something we were both excited and scared off.  When an asteroid falls on the planet, it should leave a small crater behind. After researching this topic, we generate a adjustable voxel based world. This turned out well, the terrain is destructible now. There are still a lot of questions involving  the destructible terrain, so we might have to make adjustments or just scrap the whole idea. 
• The asteroids itself are also prototyped, they are easy to configure and mark their land locations as well as having a chance to drop an item on collision with the ground. Further improvements and different variations will be added after prototype phase.
• A decision between Unity and Unreal Engine as our game engine had to be made. We all preferred Unreal Engine Initially, as this is the engine we’re all most familiar with. But after researching the movement and terrain in both engines, it quickly became clear that Unity would be the better option.
• An art style is decided and is currently being worked on, more on this next week!

The upcoming week:

With still some time to prototype left we will be focusing on

• Refining the movement
• Exploring our options regarding the terrain destruction
• Prototyping special world events, to see which are fun and which aren't
• Trying out different art styles
• Getting ready to start on the final version of the project