Welcome to Gobo Rampage's second devlog!

Art bible
We've fully finished working out our art bible! Thanks to this we've been able to shine a clear light on a couple of uncertainties. Now, we have a clear idea of the style and layout of our HUD and UI. We also have worked out the shape language for prank items and it's proportion compared to other characters. Prank items will have a sharp silhouette that works in stark contrast to our soft, rounded environment. They're rather large in size, about half as big as our goblin. Aside from that, we've gotten a couple ideas for the RFX when characters use certain actions. These effects will play an important role to enhance player feedback and mechanic polishing. For example: adventurers will have a clear "chase mark" floating around their head to show that they've seen you and will begin their chase. If you've successfully managed to escape and throw them off your trail, it'll go away.

Unity vs. Unreal
Ever since we began working on this project, we've been figuring out and doing research on what game engine to use. This week we've finally cut the knot and picked Unreal Engine. This was mostly based on the tools Unreal has to offer that make it easier to make the game look good as Unreal has better tools to build levels. For example, Unity does not have a grid and relies on 3^rd party tools to have the same kind of level editor as in Unreal. AI is a big focus of our game and Unreal has a build-in behavior tree system which makes it very useful and easy to implement. Unreal is also equipped with an eqs system, a tool with which we can find the player’s position and store it in the blackboard of the AI. Graphics wise, Unreal is also better than Unity. When you start up both engines, almost everything in Unreal already looks good thanks to presets. In Unity you would need to tweak a lot of settings and spend a lot of precious time to get the same results.

Shader prototype
We experimented with a toon water shader. When an object interferes with the shader surface the shader will circle around the object with a foam, imitating real water. Later on we will implement additional features like wavy foam & water, further simulating real water in a cartoony setting. 

Map layout prototype
Aside from being a test-level, our first layout was a bit too straight, too clean and too small for it to be a good representation of a town in the desert. It also was made with the idea of being a western town, which meant that it was best to start anew. We've combined our team's input and created a more fitting prototype. At first the map was drafted with Unreal Engine's landscaping tool to give off a more diverse feel in height differences. Then, buildings and other structures were set up with BSP's. This was really helpful as it gave us a much better overview for our player speed, it's size and the camera distance.

Unreal item prototype
Due to our decision on using Unreal, the item-switch prototype we made in Unity had to be ported over to Unreal. Our programmers are still fairly new to C++ in Unreal, so they had a lot to figure out on top of the prototypes itself. Since we couldn't figure out how to take input on a non-player object, we had to make it so the player detects the closest Item and keeps a pointer to it. A pickup function is called on the closest item in the goblin and checks if the inventory takes it or not. Switching items you pick up in the main slot when your inventory is full, was quite a challenge. After some searching, our programmers found a pretty good solution for the spawnActor function. To make meshes changeable, we figured you need to make a UStaticMeshComponent as the actual mesh that you're going to be using and a UStaticMesh as the mesh that you want to put in. While making this, we faced a huge crash that messed up the entire version of the program. Luckily, the programmer who was working on it was doing it on a local version of the project. This enabled us to restore the code and do it properly.

See you next week with another devlog!