Hello!

Introduction

I'll start by introducing our team. We are students at Digital Arts and Entertainment at Howest.
During the next 3 months we will try to create a fun and good looking couch co-op game!

Our team consists out of 6 excited students.
4 artists: Arlette Bessems, Lara D'adda, Franka Vleeshouwers and Odo Struyve
2 programmers: Twannes Claes and Robin Van Hecke

The game

Everyone is familiar with the medieval martial game called jousting. We took this concept and put it in a more fun and engaging jacket. This in the form of noodle soups with chopsticks! 
The game we will make is an arena game for 2-4 players. The players are noodle soup bowls holding chop sticks. These chop sticks will be used to charge and joust the other players. Doing so will tip over the bowls, making the opponent spill some noodles and soup.
The goal is to be the player with the most noodles left when the timer ends. So watch out of the other players, but also for your environment! And keep and eye out for power-ups to defeat your opponents easier!

Unity or Unreal

One of our first questions we had after we settled on a game concept was the game engine. from our experiences, Unreal offers a broader amount of functions, and can result in an overall more polished look. But for game developpers who want to code there games, Unity might be the better choice. Since we will be coding our game in C#, We decided to go for Unity. Even though this game engine is new for some of us, we are certain this is the better option, and are all prepared to discover and learn this engine in the next couple weeks.

Now that we settles on an engine, we started to researched some other topics on a deeper level in this engine.

Art

Although we haven't fully set on a concrete art style, we all have the same rough idea in our head on how the game should look like. Since we're going for a simple couch co-op game, we wanted to reflect that simplicity in the game art-style. We're currently testing things out with a toon shader. This shader will then be applied on our stylized noodle soup meshes.

Deferred or forward rendering

The next question we researched was the type of rendering that would work best for our project. 
Deferred rendering allowed us to use as many lights as we wanted in our scene, while keeping performance at a reasonable level. But after some testing we did find limitations on rendering semi-transparent objects and a lack of anti-aliasing support.
Forward rendering is the more out-of-the box rendering technique most game engines use. In general, this render technique looks better than deferred rendering. This technique is simpler to use but does have the disadvantage of overdraw. 
We don’t need a lot of lights in our scene. But we probably need semi-transparent objects. Therefore we picked forward rendering.

Animations

The next research question we tackled was animation. None of us have a lot of experience with animation, so we decided to start looking into this one early in the project. Luckily our main characters will be pretty basic meshes; noodle bowls. We're not sure yet if our character will have limbs. This will have a big impact on the way we animate our characters. Without limbs, we can just use keyframe animation within Unity. After some testing this seemed to be pretty straight forward. 
If we do decide to give our character limbs, we have to approach animating in a complete different way. we would have to rig and skin our character. A longer and more tedious process, but would definitely be worth the fun limb animations in the end.
In the meantime we tested and researched how to export and import animations into Unity and make them work on our models.

Next week

Next week we will keep researching more subjects,  and try to answer as many questions we may have!
We will also start making more prototypes and test out gameplay mechanics. Our main goal is to make the game fun, so this will be our focus during the prototype phase. 

That was the update for this week!
See you next week! :)